A blow by blowaccount of stonecarving

in Oxford

Sean Lynch

Sean Lynch

A blow by blow account of stonecarving in Oxford

Modern Art OxfordDublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane

Many versions of the rise and fall of O’Shea and his brother could be told.

Where exactly did they come from? Their origins seem obscure.

Accounts vary. Sentiment inevitably abounds.

Close by, down at the bottom of a laneway, the brothers were found carving a piece of wood so cleverly that they were brought directly to the building site to work.

Growing up during the famine, new stone quarries were opened to provide employment for many men of the country. The ground was dug and carved up to shape new buildings, buildings hammered and grappled out of stone and rock.

Spiky grasses, forget-me-nots,

lilies and crocuses,

folded petals and leaves,

young shoots and ferns furled like tightly coiled springs twist with rhythmic tension,

the oak,

the ivy,

acanthus,

a daffodil,

As one learns a language, the O’Sheas did imitate the sounds and grammar of their world, repeating it as an obsessive routine and replicating all in stone.

How did the O’Sheas’ craft evolve? Did they remake all that they saw, listening to birdsong while they gazed into a ditch and bushes swaying in the breeze?

shamrock, lilies,

every variety of wreath,

squirrels,

snakes,

frogs,

Their native skill was uncorrupted by any modern world.

They conjured up an Ireland crammed with lively, rude, imaginative craftsmen, all displaying a kind of ruthlessness, a determination not to let taste interfere with their conviction.

mice,

cats,

foxes,

all birds and insects depicted in random clusters as they would be found on any wayside.

They only saw the clash of interrupted rhythms, the same as it pulsed in nature, indigestible in its detail.

They had heard of one true being, but never saw him, on their walks they never came by any tidy story he had made of the world. Each blow to the stone…

They could never repress and contaminate what they carved into an ordered pattern, repeating it neatly like the wheels and cogs of their time. Instead, hours were spent orchestrating with an elementary level of form, rather than waiting for divine inspiration.

In the jungle of detail a monkeyman was found, clutching his feet and scratching his back. Did the O’Sheas know of Darwin, and the theory of human evolution from the ape?

Were the O’Sheas carving the Darwinian theory?

They always avoided the boredom of waiting around for the next world. The O’Sheas’ reality was more dense, more fundamental than God’s.

… now reverberating and echoing.

Monkey do? Monkey see?

bent on revenge for all the wrongs inf icted by En

glan

d on his native land.His destructive instincts were engraved in every line of his face and body,

th

e cur

ve o

f the n

ose

and the shape of the chin.

in th

e sl

ope of t

he forehead,

Soon the O’Sheas were called to Britain.

Getting off at the docks in Liverpool, they met the rebellious Paddy, the hybrid ape-man notorious for his violent ways,

The O’Sheas caught them in movement, evolving from one shape into another.

High up on the building, out of the way and hard to spot, the O’Sheas could get away with things.

Instead, the O‘Sheas brought in, from their morning walks, the fowers and plants that they carved into stone with vigour. At the top of the scaffold, animals would never stay so still to be carved.

No preparatory models. No clay mock-ups. Never waste time copying detailed drawings.

New employers in Oxford soon boasted of the punctual rapidity of the O’Shea’s work, delighting in their liberty of action and power in improvisation that increased efficiency and reduced costs.

Stone is a hard material,

and is hard to look at.

Affected lightness,

delicacy,

overrich,

even whimsical.

Infrastructure continued to be built and the new museum complex took shape. Suffice it to say, commentary on the building was heard near and far, chatter of styles in and out of fashion were argued.

A trip inside the exhibition hall could helpto figure out what they were up to.

Regardless of these generic descriptions, the O’Sheas hammered on.

Maybe massive,

cumbersome

and unwieldy.

Why would people go to stare at dinosaurs if it wasn’t for the uncanny fantasy of them coming back to life again?

Whatever enters any museum is placed in an order of knowledge, and is fixed and identified and labelled.

Objects and life, once free, now conscripted, harden into institutional values that form the museum itself.

but they don’t speak to us.

They have mouths,

Is he dead?

Why doesn’t he move?

but they don’t speak to us.

They have mouths,

They have eyes,

don’t

they

but

They have mouths,

and don’t see us.

They have eyes

and

don’t

see

us.

speak

us.

to

This impulse might solve questions relating to the shape and form of humanity itself, an operation in which something like ‘man’ can be decided upon and produced.

Once one set of values is established in this way, they act as the selection criteria for further advancement in each vitrine.

In a theory of evolution, animals, plants and museums are not embodiments of eternal essences but slow accumulations cemented together via reproductive isolation.

In this case, what is lost along the way? A famous example is the Oxford dodo. Its bones were brought to Britain and lodged on the South Lambeth Road in Vauxhall.

The dodo has no present tense.

It’s a great heavy bird who can fy…

Rumours abound of live specimens seen in the city. When carving a fried chicken out of a dodo, is the chicken formed inside the dodo, or is it the other way round?

The site is often described as the first public museum.

What did the dodo leave behind there? What infuences remain?

There, a museum formed in the seventeenth century, full of rarities and curiosities of every sort and kind, displayed in a room where a fee-paying public could scrutinize.

The O’Sheas knew these conventions and schemata were crutches to be dispensed with.

To fit in with a cost plan, they were advised by authorities on economic grounds to only carve a small section of the window.

Whatever was placed here would spill out of the capsized vessel.

The museum on the South Lambeth Road was known as The Ark. O’Shea and his brother worked another arc, knowing the theories of Gothic architecture, tracing the shape of pointed window arches to an upside down version of Noah’s Ark.

“I wish I had three or four like myself and we would carve all the place from time to time. I would not desire better sport than putting monkeys, cats, dogs, rabbits and hares, and so on, in different attitudes.

He rushed around the site one afternoon in a state of wild excitement.

He cried “the master found me on my scaffold just now.

“What are you at?” says he.

“Monkeys” says I.

“Come down directly,” says he.

“You shall not destroy the property of thisUniversity. Come down directly. Come down.”

O’Shea speaks:

The next day O’Shea was again on top of the scaffold, hammering furiously at the window.

“What are you at?”

“Cats.”

“You are doing monkeys when I told you not.”

“Today it’s cats.”

“What are you doing Shea? I thought you were gone.”

O’Shea was dismissed… but he appeared on top of a ladder in the doorway soon after, wielding heavy blows to the long moulding on the hard green stone.

Parrhots… repeating the same sound until it becomes sacrosanct –

Owls… as the wise authorities of the museum…

Parrhots and owls made out…

Parrhots … repeating the same sound until it becomes sacrosanct…

“Parrhots and Owwls! Parrhots and Owls!”

“O’Shea, you must knock their heads off.”

Their heads then went. Their bodies, not yet evolved, now remain.

Finding places to fit in for a while,

carving shapes that shouldn’t be…

The story then fades.

O’Shea and his brother might have stayed in Oxford, or left to roam to London, Manchester, Dublin, beyond…

Their stone survived. It would never be possible for it to elevate itself towards the sun in jubilation and to soar like the lark.

…never stopping when they should.

as the solid rock upon which universal human nature is built.

But the O’Sheas’ stone now challenges the laws and limits that place nature at the very bottom,

Anyway, any respectable ape would deny the link of a common ancestry with man.

TEXTS

Origins

no records have been found of birthdates for John and James O’shea, which could be anytime in the 1820s and 1830s. There are dual accounts, in Ballyhooly village in Cork and Callan in Kilkenny, of carvers by the name of O’shea growing up there. Both locations often claim the brothers in local history publications and in the common knowledge of the area. Thomas Deane, a partner in the archi-tectural firm Deane and Woodward, is said to have discovered one of the O’sheas “as a boy, carving a piece of timber so cleverly, he had him trained”. This incident was recalled in 1950 in the diary of Henrietta Falkiner, Deane’s daughter, and conjures up the young O’sheas’ unequivocal desire for mimesis in a manner expressed by Umberto Eco where

Man was an artist because he possessed so little: he was born naked, without tusks or claws, unable to run fast, with no shell or natural armour. But he could observe the works of nature, and imitate them. He saw how water ran down the side of a hill without sinking in, and invented a roof for his house.

Despite Falkiner’s claim, no evidence has been found of any formal training for either brother. Perhaps they observed and picked up carving skills from travel-ling craftsmen passing through the region. They may have learnt part of their trade as stonecutters in limestone quarries opened to provide employment during the harsh famine years of 1840s ireland. Of the work ethic of these places, writer Kevin Barry gives a counterpoint to earnest accounts of toil and backwrenching labour, noting persistent rumours heard about a famine-relief quarry sited at the back of his house in sligo:

One of the local farmers told me a story about it – apparently, the lads who used to work there would leave down breadcrumbs for the birds around the entrance, and then they’d laze around inside and play cards and have a good old talk about things. When the birds flew up into the air, they would know that the boss-men were on the way, and so they would start breaking stones. An early-warning system, essentially.

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sHArP TEETH / FAngs

The portrayal of the nineteenth century irish as primitives and apelike monsters is a much-discussed subject. giambattista della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomonia spurred artists on to metamorphosise individual men, classes and races as animals. By the seventeenth century artists were using animals systematically as tropes for such states of mind and morality as intelligence (the owl), lust (the goat), or stupidity (the donkey). A century later the allegorical use of animals reached the point in English caricature where Frenchmen were regularly portrayed as foxes or roosters: the Dutch as frogs; russians as bears; Turks as elephants or turkeys; and spanish as wolves.

giambattista della Porta, De Humana Physiognomonia, 1586

Cartoons of monkey-like irishmen began to appear in satirical magazines such as Punch more than a decade before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species of 1859, coinciding instead with the advent of the famine and mass immigration from ireland to British cities. in his 1971 book Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Perry Curtis argues that the logic of physiognomy helped form stereotypical representations of an irish underclass as a Cultural Other, far away from any English ethnocentrism, on a periphery of the empire in a land of hunger. in this distanced primitivism, the slope of the forehead, the curve of the nose, or the shape of the chin served as skeleton keys to unlock the secrets of the ‘real’ character hidden within each individual. While a cartoon can often be used to expose a myth or make a decisive polemical point, this particular trend seemed to only reinforce existing colonial prejudice. Curtis defines several versions of representation:

Pat: A reasonably good-looking male. A droll and politically naive peasant who amuses tourists with his endless flow of illogical talk. Clean-shaven. Devoid of sharp teeth.

THE WOnDErsMiTH AnD His sOnA TAlE FrOM THE gOlDEn CHilDHOOD OF THE WOrlD

rETOlD By EllA yOUng, 1927

it was drawing towards night, and the gubbaun had not given a thought to his sleeping place. All about him was sky, and a country that looked as if the People of the gods of Dana had been casting shoulder-stones in it since the beginning of time. As far as the gubbaun’s eyes travelled there was nothing but stone; gray stone, silver stone, stone with veins of crystal and amethyst, stone that was purple to blackness; tussocks and mounds of stone; plateaus and crags and jutting peaks of stone; wide endless, spreading deserts of stone. like a jagged cloud, far-off, a city climbed the horizon. The gubbaun sat down. He drew a barley-cake from his wallet, and some cresses. He ate his fill and stretched himself to sleep. The pallor of dawn was in the air when a shriek tore the sleep from him. He sat up: great wings beat the sky making darkness above him, and something dropped to the earth within hand-reach. He fingered it – a bag of tools! As he touched them he knew that he had skill to use them though his hands had never hardened under a tool in his life. He slung the wallet on his shoulder and set off towards the town. As he neared it he was aware of a commotion among the townsfolk – they ran hither and thither; they stared at the sky; they clung together in groups. “What has happened to your town?” said the gubbaun to a man he met. “A great misfortune has happened”, said the man. “This town, as you can see, has the noblest buildings in the world: poets have made songs about this town. This town is itself a song, a boast, a splendor, a cry of astonishment! “Three Master-Builders came to this town – builders that had not their fellows on the ridge of the world. They set themselves to the making of a Marvel; a Wonder of Wonders; a Cause of Astonishment and Envy; a Jewel; a Masterpiece in this town of Masterpieces – this place that is jewelled like the Tree of Heaven and drunken with Marvels! “One pact alone, one obligation they bound with oath on the townsfolk – no living person was to come within the enclosure where they worked; no living person – man, woman, or child – was to set eyes on them when they passed through the town with the tools of their trade in their hands. it was Geas for them to be looked on. We cloaked our eyes when they passed, we darkened our windows when they passed, we closed our doors. “Three days they were working and passing through the town with the tools of their trade. We had contentment, and luck and prosperity, til the whitening of this dawn. The a red-polled woman thrust her head forth – my curse on the breed and seed of her for seven generations – she set the edge of her eyes on the Three Master-Builders. They let a screech out of them and rose in the air. They put the shapes of birds on themselves and flew away – my grief, three black crows! now the stone waits for the hammer: and the hammer is lost with the hand that held it!” The gubbaun tightened his grasp on the wallet, and his feet took him of their own accord away from the town. “The tools have come to the man who can handle them”, said the gubbaun to himself: “but i’ll handle then for the first time where there are fewer tongues to wag.”

Punch, 1832

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Paddy: A supporter of self-government for the irish, yet against lethal violence to attain this goal. Despite a protrusive mouth and jaw and stooped posture he still manages to qualify as human, even when drunk and disorderly. A virile and quite menacing creature. Hairy.

simian Paddy: A dangerous cross between monstrous ape and primitive man, a demonised figure bent on murder and mayhem. He roars for a rebellion against the Crown, yet he would only create chaos and violence in its place. sharp teeth / fangs.

As the ideas in On the Origin of Species reached wider audiences, Punch maga-zine fused the irish Other into the neo-Darwinian debate. Oxford historian roy Foster quotes a diatribe on irish ghettos and the building industry that appeared in the magazine in 1862:

A creature manifestly between gorilla and the negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of london and liverpool by adventurous explorers. it comes from ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of irish savages; the lowest species of the irish yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. it is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder with a hod of bricks. The irish yahoo generally confines itself within the confines of its own colony, except when it goes out of them to get its living. sometimes, however, it sallies forth in states of excitement, and attacks civilised human beings that have provoked its fury. The somewhat superior ability of the irish yahoo to utter articulate sounds, may suffice to prove that it is a development, and not, as some imagine, a degeneration of the gorilla.

Foster has argued that these cartoons about irish ethnicity need to be recast in terms of class distinction. Were all working-class types, disenfranchised by the system and left without a delineated history, not considered as dark and brutish? The mode of a threat-ening underclass continued to be updated into representations of the irA in the 1970s.

One might speculate that the O’sheas encountered Punch’s editorial of the 1850s and were aware of these representations as they consciously incorporated the carvings of monkeys as part of their repertoire. Certainly, the presence of a stone monkey with an aggressive appearance on a building’s facade seamlessly fits in with notions of the grotesque. Here, carvings perceived as demons and monsters cast out of the inner sanctum of a church or town hall now take refuge high up, almost out of view yet ready to return with consummate angst and fury. Another resonance is babewyn, a medieval spelling of ‘baboon’ and perhaps best inter-preted as ‘monkeying around’ or ‘monkey business’. Babewyn was the word most likely used for architectural sculpture by medieval people, and was prominently featured by geoffrey Chaucer in his poem The House of Fame. given the interest of the gothic revival in all things medieval, the word might have been shouted around the O’sheas’ building site. As for the O’sheas’ appearance, the remaining photographs of James O’shea are in black and white, yet the colour of both brothers’ beards was recorded by Dante gabriel rossetti, cofounder of the Pre-raphaelite Brotherhood, “every morning came the handsome red-bearded irish brothers O’shea bearing plants from the Botanic garden to re-appear under their chisels in the rough-hewn capitals of the pillars.”Punch, 1870

Houston Chronicle, 1979

James O’shea, Oxford, 1859

Fun, 1877

THE grAnD sTOry OF THE gOTHiC

goths and Vandals, after destroying all greek and roman architecture, introduced in its place a fantastical and licentious manner of building, full of fret and lamentable imagery, sparing neither pains nor cost. yet soon the melancholic combinations of ruins, ivy and owls were all exhausted, and the gothic went into hiding, waiting to return in the 1740s and onwards. Pamphlets began to appear promoting the style and finding it respectable origins. its pointed arc was traced to the intersection of boughs in a tranquil forest, to the forms of solomon’s Temple and to the inverted keel of noah’s Ark. Kenneth Clark’s introduction in his book The Gothic Revival notes that many thought the style was hopelessly antiquated, and that its protagonists such as John ruskin were romantics out of touch with the progress of industry and science. Buildings of the gothic revival were “the subject of hyena laughter in the highbrow weeklies”. Before the prominent rise of the heritage and conservation industries, it was reported in the Architectural review of 1962 that the University of Oxford had voted to tear down the Oxford Museum building, a prominent example of the style, and replace it with a structure by italian modernist Pier luigi nervi. Clark concluded his book with a nietzsche quote, “Blessed are those who have taste, even although it be bad taste.”

Trinity College Dublin, with carvings byJohn and James O’shea, c. 1856

John ruskin was an art critic and social reformer at the centre of these debates. His writing on the Venetian Byzantine influenced the design of the Museum Building at Trinity College Dublin, completed by architectural firm Deane and Woodward in 1857. irish historian Con Curran wrote of Benjamin Woodward, the principal designer in the firm,

This unknown disciple has swallowed his gospel hook, line and sinker. His sensitive scholarship had not merely adapted to a modern purpose the architectural forms of ruskin’s favourite period, but he had practiced in what ruskin always maintained was the manner of its working. He gave the craftsman an artist’s liberty; he did not control the details of design; the craftsmen were not his tools, but worked to their own fancy as his collaborators.

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Of an irish craftsman’s thirst for alcohol, a ritualistic mid-morning consumption of pints is recalled by seamus Murphy in his romantic reminisce on the irish stonecarving industry in 1950’s Stone Mad. Back when the decoration of churches, banks and civic buildings were stables of the trade, the youngest apprentice on site was sent out to bring a tray of drink up the scaffold, not daring to spill a drop, to thirsty carvers already covered in dust from a hectic morning’s work. instead, the O’sheas’ life in Britain appears more focused and communal, akin to a small independent colony. in 1854, after years of agitation by physician and educator Henry Acland, the University of Oxford decided to build a museum for the study of natural science, and began a competition for its design with the slogan “For the better display of materials illustrative of the facts and laws of the natural world”. This ethos was extended to accommodate the work of the O’sheas. A temporary annex for workmen was built onsite with a mess-room and reading room. There, they could study exotic animal specimens, consult archi-tectural treatises and gradually think out what they might carve on the building in front of them. One imagines the trio walking around Oxford in the evenings, critiquing the plentiful amounts of stonecarving to be seen there. All in all, such conditions allowed their work to grow from and grapple with the site of Oxford itself. it granted the group the right to work out an architectural destiny for themselves in terms of their own experience instead of entrusting it to some knowledgeable, objective authority.

The Oxford Museum building site, with workmen’s building in front

While these rewarding forms of research were encouraged, much of the working day involved repetitive, laborious hammering at stone. A top rate of pay for a carver of the time was 60 old pence, or today’s equivalent of £15 a day.

Accordingly, carvings inside and outside of the building by John and James O’shea are varied and never repetitive. As an essential part of true gothic expression, those who carved ornament should be active intelligences in the design of their own output. This was in accordance with ruskin’s dictum that workmen should not be treated as machines, as he believed they were in classical architecture. A useful comparison to this approach can be found in the stories of the renaissance, where architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi walked around the building site with a bag of turnips, liberally carving shapes into them before handing the vegetable over to carvers who had strict instructions to precisely replicate the desired effect in stone. some histories have suggested ruskin came to Dublin, discovered and recruited the O’sheas on the spot, asking them to move to Oxford and lead the carving on the new museum complex to be built there. This version of events was spurred on by ruskin’s letter read at the Architectural Congress in Oxford in 1858, when he claimed that Trinity was the first contemporary building where the principle of the ‘liberty of the workmen’ had been recognised. it acted as an example of a site primarily concerned with the ethical

and social responsibilities of public art and the moral conditions of the workmen who execute it. yet, ruskin only visited Dublin and saw Deane and Woodward’s building in person later in september 1861, well after the O’sheas arrival in Britain sometime in 1857. it is much more likely that the O’sheas had canvassed and convinced ruskin of their skills by way of a photographic portfolio that represented work samples of corbels and capitals. such images, including one of a monkey, were found by Deane and Woodward’s biographer Frederick O’Dwyer in the University of Oxford archives in the 1990s. After arriving in Oxford, John and James O’shea, accompanied by their younger stonecarving cousin Edward Whelan, set to work on interior details in the new museum building. Over thirty capitals were due to be completed, none to be the same as each other. The group frequented the University’s botanic gardens to fetch plants that they subsequently brought onsite, arranged and copied. Unlike other carvers of the era, no time was spent making up elaborate preparatory drawings or models in clay. This streamlined approach made ruskin consider the O’sheas’ elaborate carvings as an economy. He told an audience in Manchester in July 1857 that now “capitals of various design could be executed cheaper than capitals of similar design… by about 30 percent.” records show that ruskin awarded a prize to one of the brothers in a carving competition in January 1858. Con Curran, whose father once saw the O’sheas carve, wrote in 1940 about rumours of the heavy drinking habits of the group that led to their eventual removal from the job.

There is another story now current that the dismissal of the O’sheas was due to their convivial habits. i can find in their fragmentary record no scrap of contemporary evidence to confirm this but much that goes in disproof.

Carving, possibly bythe O’sheas, c. 1857

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gardens to carve, were creating new orders of foliage carving and not working to set formula. Unlike the Victorian carvers of the time, the O’sheas work is not repetitive and its vitality and enthusiasm set it apart. Take, for example, the screw Pine capital in the interior court. The O’sheas had no carved reference of a screw pine. As they walked through Oxford they would have found many examples of acanthus leaf, oak leaf, ivy, roses, all the usual suspects in the limited range of carved ornament. With the screw pine, they are out on their own. They have to resolve how to make it ‘work’ architec-turally in stone as a coherent, formal component – to do this they must create.

The leather Fern capital again demonstrates a high level of craftsmanship and creativity. Here, craft has the upper hand – we see deep shadow, composition, high finish and detailing – the forms are well articulated and an understanding of how it will read in its architectural setting is apparent. While certainly creative and particularly dramatic it remains more aligned to the tradition of their craft. This capital was photographed soon after its realisation and was used to encourage further potential sponsors of carved ornament at the museum. Perhaps it is encumbered by this expectant audience. in other works we see the balance move away from craft, with more liberal expression coming to the fore.

insiDE THE O’sHEAs

sTEPHEn BUrKE

The O’sheas began carving on the Trinity Museum Building in Dublin in 1854. Deane and Woodward, the architects of the Museum, championed their creative style that appeared in a free manner quite apart from much Victorian work of the time. Animals in various mischievous aspects and small incidental foliage carv-ings on the base of pillars can be found. Monkeys pulling the tails of cats, and frogs nestling on the banister of the stairs each enrich the heavily ornamented building. These dynamic and explorative works are all underpinned by the quality of the O’sheas’ craftsmanship. They built their own language of carving over the course of their work in Trinity and came to Oxford in 1857 with Deane and Wood-ward, who had won the competition to design the new Oxford Museum, with a keen appetite for creativity and a clear vision of how they wanted to work. The O’sheas comprised of brothers James and John O’shea and their cousin Edward Whelan. in analysing their output, i find it helpful to look at the O’sheas as a working group and not to focus on them so much as individuals. Having worked alongside other sculptors on architectural projects i am mindful of the working dynamic that is developed amongst a group and how much each sculptor influences the others. in my experience a discernable micro-identity builds: as one develops a solution to dealing with a problem, another will employ some of that new knowledge. reacting and responding, the group collectively progress and often elements that can be identified as a trademark of one carver will appear in another’s work. There is often much discussion and pooling of information – it is a generous environment. Amongst architectural sculptors the sense of artistic individuality is not always fully formed. Perhaps this stems from the strong apprentice tradition, and the understanding that the carved work is serving a purpose in an overall scheme. individuality is not placed at the forefront; it is the act of making that takes precedence. This is evident in the work of the O’sheas and is the prism through which i look at their work. Amongst the many carvings on the Oxford Museum, forty-five capitals and corbals are to be found in the interior court. it is there we can get closer to the O’sheas as sculptors, where their work consists almost exclusively of foliage carving and is unaffected by the colourful, more animalistic history later played out on the building’s facade. The O’sheas stand out from their Victorian sculptor peers whose carving for the most part is neat, repetitive and prescriptive rather than creative. Much Victorian work had a misty-eyed relationship with the gothic era, looking to stringently recreate rather than forge something new. The Charing Cross monument in london, a reconstructed version of the original 13th century Walthamstow Eleanor Cross, is a good example of the work carried out around the period of the O’sheas. Designed by the architect EM Barry, who came third to Deane and Woodward in the Oxford Museum design competition, the monument is greatly ornamented. The quality of carving is high – form and detailing is coherent and strong. There are over two thousand oak leaf crockets on the Charing Cross monument, all conforming to just a few different variations. in comparison, at the Oxford Museum, the O’sheas are not carving hundreds of the same form to a template. Of the capitals within the interior court of the Museum, none are alike. Many of them represent foliage that has never been conventionally rendered in stone before. The O’sheas, picking specimen samples from Oxford’s botanic

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On the norwegian spruce capital the efficient process of the O’sheas’ craft is clear, but it is only present to underpin and facilitate their own explorations. Firstly, they set out the overall composition onto the stone, then carved the surface straight back, leaving the stems raised. A v-cut was then carved along the stems. When this was complete the ‘needles’ were carved, possibly with a gouge-shaped chisel. The innovation of drill holes, representing the needles of the spruce seen on end, were lastly added. The technique of drilling is often deployed within the skill of stone carving, yet rarely with the intent of representation as here. The result is impressionistic and not part of a more formal tradition of archi-tectural carving. note the clearly unfinished section where the ‘needles’ were simply not rendered. Was scaffolding restricting their way in – did they intend to finish at a later date when there was better access? Were they under pressure to finish in this work area to allow for other building works to proceed? All these things are normal on-site and do have an effect on a carver’s work. i expect it is more than that with the O’sheas. Perhaps they had satisfied their creative urge on this capital and were hungry to move to the next to explore further. Maybe their enthusiasm overrode their professionalism as they eyed the next piece of stone. Work such as the norwegian spruce might initially seem clunky and unre-solved. However this is not a lack of craftsmanship or an uncaring hurry – it is something more sophisticated. The O’sheas are reticent to articulate their subjects in the tradition of strong architectural carving. They have a different approach, coaxing out the play of leaves and textures as they see fit, allowing surfaces and forms to be animated and vitalised by the potential they still hold. it is precisely because they are competent craftsmen that they have no need to place their craftsmanship on display – it is exclusively creativity that matters to them. They seem to become less concerned about those that will view and judge their work, finding greater validation in their own explorations. in the English yew capital we see a subtle impression of the foliage. All of the informa-tion is there but achieved by barely releasing shapes from the stone. The O’sheas come into their own when they do not excessively articulate form. They didn’t deem it necessary to ‘finish’, instead embracing texture and process. i imagine their appetite for this type of work became evermore insatiable and they use this unfinished aesthetic to facilitate a framework to take on more creative challenges. The client, having laid the conditions for this freedom of expression, later found themselves attempting to keep some form of control by withholding payment for ‘unfinished’ carving – it doesn’t seem to have worked.

Almost 2,000 years before the O’sheas carved their capitals in Oxford, Vitruvius wrote his account of the origin of the Corinthian capital, the most ornate of the classical orders. A girl, a native of Corinth, was attacked by disease and died. After her funeral, the goblets that delighted her when living were put in a basket by her nurse, taken and placed at her monument. so that they might remain longer, as they were exposed to the weather, the nurse covered the basket with a tile. As it happened the basket was placed upon the root of an acanthus. At springtime the acanthus, pressed down by the weight of the nurse’s offering, put forth leaves and shoots. They grew up the sides of the basket and, being pressed down at the angles by the force of the weight of the tile, were compelled to form the curves of volutes at the extreme parts. Just then sculptor Callimachus, known for the refinement and delicacy of his artistic work, passed by the tomb and observed the basket with the tender young leaves growing round it. Delighted with the novel style and form, he carved some capitals after that pattern for the Corinthians. He determined symmetrical proportions, approved and estab-lished from that time forth the rules to be followed in finished works of the Corinthian order. Callimachus, having observed nature, puts in place a formal template that is effectively followed for over two millennia. The O’sheas, when they pick samples from the botanic gardens, revisit the point at which Callimachus discovers the

acanthus growing around the basket at the moment just before the rules of carving are approved. yet the O’sheas don’t establish a new formula or doctrine – their work tends towards a true and unencumbered creativity, leaving many of their contemporaries to simply follow the lines of prescribed craft.

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ste

ms

Bra

nche

s

Drill holes / needles on end

Uncarved

V-cut

… They nosed at his calves and his thighs, they breathed on his shoulder, they nuzzled the back of his neck, they went bumping off tree-trunks and rock-face,they spouted and plunged like a waterfall, until he gave them the slip and escapedin a swirling tongue of low cloud.

This incident drove sweeney into another intense fit of madness and lamenting, and the pages of verse continue to amass as he sees the new Christian hierarchy alienate and sideline the pagan society of which he was king. His anxieties are further accelerated in Flann O’Brien’s proto-postmodern telling of the story in 1939’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Here, sweeney shares pages with a devil known as the Pooka MacPhellimey and Dermot Trellis, a writer of Wild West literature. in this company sweeney becomes more exaggerated, foolish and comical, almost as if he must now fight for attention in his plight. The original ‘an clog náomh re náomhaibh’, (‘the bell of saints before saints’) in Jg O’Keeffe’s 1913 translation is frenetically portrayed by O’Brien as ‘the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints’. sweeney’s uncomfortable, frenetic pace means he is never fully visualised in any one place. As he scuttles along, his verses never come to terms with all that has occurred at any site he encounters. He cannot settle long enough to find focus; instead he resorts to nervous chattering in each location. All he can hope for is to see something that leads to another place or thought, to continue to lament the weight of the world before him. Heaney’s 1983 version saw sweeney’s story reaching a larger audience, and it soon became a popular theme with several neo-expressionist painters in ireland. As consensus grew around the necessity of art to return and examine concerns of the human figure, what better challenge could there be? How could you paint half-man, half-bird? in any of the versions of sweeney, he moves too fast for anyone to see whether he has a beak or feathers or hands, or even what size he is. such plurality of character made him ideal fodder for the artistic mode of the time. Eventually after years of wandering, sweeney began to radiate towards a farm in Carlow where, for the first time since being cursed, he found kindness and supper made for him each evening. There the cook Muirghil would sink her heel into the nearest cow-dung, shaping a bowl and filling it up to the brim with fresh milk. He would then sneak in from nearby trees and lap it up. While it is best not to spoil the end of the story, an evocative appearance occurs in Tom Fitzgerald’s sculpture Sweeney’s Throne, a work sited in limerick City. There, upon the seat of the sculpture, Fitzgerald intervenes into the narrative to invite sweeney to rest from his travels and compose an ode to the welcoming surroundings he finds himself in.

An BUilE sHUiBHnE

iterations of the wandering spirit, as seen in the life of the O’sheas, find a kinship in the medieval epic poem of An Buile Shuibhne. Translated as ‘The Madness of sweeney’, or ‘sweeney’s Frenzy’, it tells the story of a legendary king of Ulster through a mixture of lyrical laments, rhapsodies and curses. set in the year 637 in the midst of tensions between ancient Celtic traditions and the newly arrived Christian domination, the king sweeney is suddenly angered by the clink of a bell. He soon learns the sound came from Bishop ronan who plans to build a church on sweeney’s territory. At this he storms, naked, out of his castle to find ronan, taking an illuminated manuscript from him and throwing it into the depths of a nearby lake where it sinks without trace. next, he furiously grabs hold of the bishop, and would have killed him were he not called at that very moment to fight in battle. left alone after the attack, ronan plotted revenge. He remembered some of his old pagan tricks, and cursed sweeney with madness. At that moment at the Battle of Moira, alleged to be the largest battle ever fought in ireland, he dropped his weapon and began to morph in form. seamus Heaney recalls the scene in his 1983 translation Sweeney Astray:

his brain convulsed, his mind split open.Vertigo, hysteria, lurchingsand launchings came over him, he staggered and flapped desperately,he was revolted by the thoughts of known placesand dreamed strange migrations.His fingers stiffened,his feet scuffled and flurried, his heart was startled, his senses were mesmerized, his sight was bent,the weapons fell from his handsand he levitated in a frantic cumbersome motionlike a bird of the air.

From that point on, sweeney leapt from place to place, naked, lonely and hungry. like a bird, he could never trust humans. His old kinsmen and subjects sent him mad with fear, and he could only scuttle from spot to spot around present-day ireland, scotland and Wales, all the while acting outcast and shifty. The mad and exiled king composed verse as he travelled. At every stop in his flight, he pauses to recite a poem describing the countryside and his unfortunate plight. ronan continued his agenda against sweeney, convincing god to send bleeding, headless torsos and five goat-bearded disembodied heads after him. Heaney picks up the story:

The heads were pursuing him, lolling and baying, snapping and yelping, whining and squealing.

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Tom Fitzgerald, Sweeney’s Throne, 1987

iT is THE TAil THAT BETrAys THE sPiDEr MOnKEy

The Pitt rivers Museum houses the University of Oxford’s collection of anthro-pology and world archaeology. Established in 1884, it is accessed from the same entrance as the Museum of natural History, and visitors must walk by the O’sheas’ carvings to reach it. The premise of exhibition case C144A, labeled Forms suggested by natural shapes, is a series of objects that, by appreciative observation, look like an animal or other natural forms. Prominent in the display is a stone donated by Henry Balfour, the inaugural curator of the museum. He found it in 1900 at a location a few miles outside Oxford. On close inspection it resembles a monkey’s head. Other artefacts in the case from Burma, Canada and italy have been deliberately altered to further resemble and accentuate the forms they were first observed to look like, such as snakes and pigeons. in Balfour’s only book, 1893’s The Evolution of Decorative Art, the fluidity of this approach is made evident. in an analogy with the theory of evolution, the morphology of animal forms is taken as a starting point to explore objects in the Pitt rivers Collection and beyond. By the late nineteenth century, specimens of the arts and crafts of various peoples had long been collected in museums and were often regarded as little more than curiosities or trophies. Balfour’s ideas, developed through his work as a curator and teacher in the university, helped to dissolve any static sense of stale colonialism. Firstly, Balfour details methods of unconscious variation where changes in form are not intentional, but are due to lack of skill or careless copying, difficulty of material, or reproducing from memory. He writes,

let us suppose that someone, whom i will call A, copies an object, and B copies A’s version of it without having seen the original, and C copies B’s and so on; in each case the new copy varies from the immediately preceding one more or less according to the skill of the artist. We can readily see that in the course of time such successive copying designs can arise, which may entirely lose all resemblance to the original object, and to A’s would-be realistic version of it.

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Another factor is conscious variation, in which development is intentional, and may be made to serve some useful purpose such as marks of ownership, to increase ornamental effect or adopt a design to a variety of functions or situations. For example seeds from Burma in the shape of a snake’s head were accordingly used as a charm to protect against snakebites.

looking at a collection of ornamental patterns from Papua new guinea, Balfour traces modifications in design from a bird motif to a somewhat abstract version of a human head.

Balfour makes another keen observation on basketwork design of the same region. He decodes the pattern present as resembling a spider monkey. Balfour acknowledges that while the form of the head, body and limbs would by no means necessarily lead to this conclusion. instead,

it is the tail that betrays the spider monkey. The characteristic coil-up extremity of the long tail is well indicated in the neces-sarily conventional representations in the baskets, and supplies us with the clue… in the design two figures are brought together with the idea of symmetry, though we might almost suppose that the two together represented a monkey on the banks of a river, with its inverted reflection in the water below it.

through very clearly in the heated debate. The argument takes the course of an arc leading from the problem of the distribu-tion of wealth through the population explosion, the market economy, food production, environmental damage and urbanism to nuclear power, etc. And as the lengthy dispute goes on, with the two of them moving from place to place in the two-storey labyrinth of the museum, suddenly the artefacts in the display cases find their voices and start to speak up because they’ve got their own ideas about how the world works. They join in the conversation, in the strife. Even items of furniture put their oar in and start to shift around. The noise level increases and the situation starts getting out of hand. suddenly a chair crashes down from a balustrade into the glass lid of a display case. A neon tube explodes with a loud bang and the scene is plunged into darkness. Ethnographic artefacts are tumbling on top of each other and their cries of protest rise to a Babylonian cacophony. The general consensus is that the coyote is responsible for the mayhem. so the review of the origins of the world takes its course. in the end, when everyone is exhausted but no explanation has been found for the way the world is, you see the raven from behind, no longer just a shadow, leaving the museum, getting into a Bentley in the pouring rain and driving off. That was reference to Joseph Beuys, of course, our revered teacher. He had a Bentley at the time and wrote a letter of recommendation for our museum project. At the beginning of the film you see the backs of the knees of some school children, edged by the tops of their socks and the hems of their school uniforms; and you hear the voice of their teacher, explaining the huge totem pole of the Haida indians. He talks about the signs of different tribes – with animal symbols – carved into the cedar tree trunk, one above the other, and painted. you hear him listing the names of the different tribes and the children getting restless. Very gradually you get to see the whole picture – the class in the museum, with the children between the display cases standing looking at the totem pole, and you hear the teacher’s voice, receding, as he comes to the last symbolic creature on the totem pole, which is the raven. The camera pans slowly to the left and stops at a display case. The shadow of the raven on the glass of the case suddenly moves as it hears the voice of the coyote, deliberately provoking him. The following dialogue concerns the masks, figures, models fetishes, instruments and costumes in the display case; in their seemingly endless variety they bear witness to the processes of creation, the origins of the world.

rEPrinTED WiTH THE KinD PErMissiOn OF THE WElTKUlTUrEn MUsEUM, FrAnKFUrT AM MAin.

ExTrACT, PAgEs 390 – 391 FrOM ‘COnqUEring THE sOUTHErn COnTinEnT in THE HAzE OF A sixPEnny CigAr.

lOTHAr BAUMgArTEn AnD MiCHAEl OPPiTz in COnVErsATiOn WiTH CléMEnTinE DEliss’ PUBlisHED in OBJECT ATLAS – FIELDwORk In THE MuSEuM, WElTKUlTUrEn MUsEUM AnD

KErBEr VErlAg, 2012

Delissyou mean the film Der Rabe and der kojote (The raven and the Coyote)? What is that about? What’s in it?

Oppitz i remember there was a mask from the Kwakiutl tribe, whose lands are on the west coast of present-day Canada, with a raven’s head, and another one with a coyote’s head. in the film these masks are worn by two people. The two characters go to the Pitt rivers Museum to see their relatives on view in the display cases, because they’ve heard that there are more coyotes and ravens there. so they go in, walk up to a display case and are overcome. They think, “What’s this? in Europe our people are locked away behind glass?” it seems very strange to them. They continue their tour and gradually recognise the system used to arrange things here. They consider whether they should conform to the same system or stick to their own. Unable to reach a conclusion, they decide they need some refreshment. “Okay, so let’s have a pint in The Three Crowns.” That’s the pub where Evans-Pritchard always used to sit, tormenting his assistants and students. The film ends with them ordering a guinness at the bar.

Baumgarteni also remember it was to be a film about a raven and a coyote: they were going to be the protagonists in a complex dialogue on the origins of the world. The starting point was a creation myth, as told by the Haida, Kwakiutl or the Tlingit. The raven only appears in the film as a shadowy shape passing across the display cases. He’s wearing a raven mask, a trench coat and, rather unexpectedly, flippers. The Coyote is symbolised by a piece of red silk, which sometimes lingers on the back of a chair, sometimes floats through the air; the gleam of the silk is reflected or refracted in the glass panes of the display cases, sometimes you can only tell where it is by its fluttering. Both of them, our actors, are mythological figures. After they’ve chatted about the weather, they quickly get into a dispute about the state of the world, which seems beyond help, with all its conflicts. Their opposing characters come

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lambeth, alongside a flying squirrel, gourds, olives, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs. and an instrument used in circumcision. On show were parts of an Agnus scythicus, a plant that grew a stalk out of the ground with a lamb attached on top. Once the lamb had eaten all the grass in the vicinity of the stalk, both it and the plant died. Officially known as Musaeum Tradescantianum, the enterprise gradually became known as The Ark. While acting as a biblical reference, perhaps this title was also intended to evoke the cramped inclusiveness of the collection, as if everything made by civilisation could be found there. Tradescant’s house was at 113 – 119 south lambeth, and the gardens and orchard ran south from there. no detailed description has been found on how the rarities were displayed, and it is unknown if the museum was in the house or in a special building in the garden. The complex was demolished in 1881 and today visitors can visit several restaurants, fast food outlets, betting shops, newsagents and a pharmacy at The Ark’s location.

Agnus scythicus

THE ArK

John Tradescant the ElderOil on canvas, attributed to Emanuel De Critz

The life of John Tradescant is a well-worn story, but bears repeating. Tradescant the Elder (c. 1570 – 1638) was a botanist, importing foreign shrubs and plants to Britain. From Dutch descent, he confidently made his way around Europe, north Africa and siberia, dispatching cherry trees, figs, peaches and pomegranates back to his patrons while all the time holding close a covert purpose: the assembly of a collection of objects that explored all human and natural knowledge of the time. Wheeling and dealing, he invested in speculative explorations across the Atlantic to the new world of Virginia. Tradescant moved into a house in lambeth on the south side of the Thames sometime in the 1620s. While the aristocracy of the time often showed off cabi-nets of curiosities to their social equals, Tradescant now opened his collection to the public, the first time this occurred in the anglicised world, predating The British Museum who opened their doors much later in 1753. Anyone with an entrance fee of 6 pence (in today’s currency around £2.50) could go have a look. Tradescant’s activity of collecting and exhibiting might have been influenced by the idea of solomon’s House, a fictional institution portrayed in Francis Bacon’s 1627 novel The new Atlantis that acted as a place to study objects and artefacts from the past along with the new inventions of the present. Fossils, shells, insects, shoes from afar, dragon’s eggs, weapons, jewels, the hand of a mermaid, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, hats, an abacus, stones, snake bones, cheese, feathers from a phoenix and tobacco pipes from Brazil were present in

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AFTEr THE ArK

siMOn WOODlEy

Prior to 1986 only multi-national companies based in the UsA were offering franchise opportunities in the fried chicken sector of the British fast food industry. it was at this time Favorite recognised a substantial gap in the market for high quality fried chicken stores in neighbourhood-like locations rather than drive-throughs and commercial high streets. The concept was to open a chain of professionally run restaurants offering at least equal quality of food and service as any brand leader, but at a fraction of the set up cost.  in August 1986 seven stores opened simultaneously under the trading name Favorite Fried Chicken. All in and around Central london, these consisted of four company-owned and three franchised units. some of these original Favorite stores are still happily trading as part of today’s franchise system, including one on the south lambeth road. in the mid-1990s a three-year initiative was imple-mented, expanding the brand to other locations and launching a new menu. A major updating of the corporate image took place with all stores undergoing refurbishment and rebranding as Favorite Chicken & Ribs. Favorite also expanded out of Britain, opening sites in The netherlands and germany.   Favorite offers a fully structured franchise system. For an initial fee the franchisee gets twelve months exclusivity to the Favorite brand in a locality while seeking premises. Favorite also assist with shop fitting through a range of bright modern store designs, supply staff training, and assistance in organising bank loans to fund the venture. Once up and running, Favorite continues to liaise with the store operator via its Field Operation Managers and quality & Training Team to provide support for all aspects of the business, from operational matters through to local advertising and promotion. Favorite are now one of the largest UK-owned chicken franchise chains with over ninety stores. Over the last twenty-eight years it has demonstrated its success by providing a product menu and operational system to match and exceed the market leader in the sector, whilst offering a far more competitive cost to franchisees. Favorite is still owned and operated by one of the founding directors and for the last eight years has been wholly owned by one family. A key part of Favorite’s brand is the Chuckie motif, which dates from the company’s beginnings and appears on all shopfronts and food packaging. Chuckie was first drawn by an art student at southend Polytechnic in 1986.

THE KniCKKnACKATOry

in 1650, antiquary and politician Elias Ashmole visited The Ark. soon after, taken by the apparent mysticism of the collection, he attempted his first magical experiment, successfully ridding his house of insects and pests by casting lead representations of flies, fleas, caterpillars and toads. With John Tradescant the younger (1608 – 1662) now running the museum, Ashmole assisted in compiling and publishing a catalogue in 1656. iain sinclair takes up the story in 1997’s Lights out for the Territory,

After a seasonal route in December 1659, when heroic quan-tities of drink were taken, Ashmole produced a deed of gift which Tradescant signed in front of witnesses – granting the collection to Ashmole. Within a month of Tradescant’s death in 1662, Ashmole preferred a Bill in Chancery against the widow Hester, a lady of insecure temperament. The case was decided in Ashmole’s favour.

He then moved into a house adjacent to the Tradescants in 1674 and transferred some items from The Ark into his ownership. in 1678, in the midst of further legal wrangling, Hester was found drowned in a garden pond. By early 1679, Ashmole had taken over the lease of the Tradescant property and began merging his own and their collection into one. He filled up twelve wagons, and transferred it all to Oxford, donating it to the University on the condition that a suitable building was made available to house the artefacts. Bearing his name, the Ashmolean Museum was opened in 1683. With its variety of rarities and curiosities, it was referred to in some quarters as The Knickknackatory. gradually over time, the collection became dispersed around Oxford – geological and zoological specimens went to the natural History Museum, manuscripts to the Bodleian library, and ethnographical items to the Pitt rivers. nowadays, the Ashmolean has a new building where a basement room remembers The Ark’s contribution to its beginnings. Most prominent here is Tradescant’s acquisition of the mantle of indian chief Powhaten, featuring four tanned deer hides sown together with small shells making the shape of a human figure surrounded by two animals. Powhaten was the father of Pocahontas, the romanticised native American figure whose integrity to humanism demonstrated the potential of indigenous peoples to be assimilated into the ideals of the incoming European society.

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Powhaten’s Mantle, installed at the Ashmolean Museum

DiDUs inEPTUs / rAPHUs CUCUllATUs

A stuffed dodo formed part of Tradescant’s collec-tion, as recorded in the 1656 catalogue. From the island of Mauritius, the flightless bird was first found by Dutch colonisers in 1598 and conse-quently became extinct a century later. While it is hard to estimate how many live dodos were brought to london, a 1638 account from theologian Hamon l’Estrange details seeing a poster advertising strange fowl. soon he

with one or two more then in com-pany went in to see it. it was kept in a chamber, and was a great fowle somewhat bigger than the largest Turky Cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thick-er and of a more erect shape, col-oured before like the breast of a young cock fesan, and on the back of dunn and deare colour. The keeper called it a Dodo.

Today the dodo often acts as a symbol of obsolescence and is mentioned in conversations about natural selection and the survival of the fittest. The scientific name first given to the bird by the eighteenth-century swedish taxonomist Carl linnaeus was Didus ineptus, reflecting the dodo’s reputation for being stupid and ungainly. recently, revisions to this viewpoint have been aired; perhaps those birds that did reach Europe were obese because of their confinement and captive diet in the hold of a ship for many months. Furthermore, measurements of remaining bones, together with calculations on how much weight the bird’s skeleton could have carried, suggest that a dodo was much thinner. The natural History Museum in Oxford now houses a slim replica of the bird made by Andrew Kitchner in the 1990s, and it now has a new and less derogatory scientific name, Raphus cucullatus. The dodo is well celebrated in Oxford’s culture, appearing in the story of Alice in wonderland by lewis Carroll. The role of the dodo, alongside Tradescant and Ashmole, as a witness and participant in the beginning of public museum culture in Britain should not be underestimated. its presence, as a dead bird, had to be administered into a system of classification. As part of the infrastructure set up around the Ashmolean in the 1680s, artefacts were divided up into natural and manmade objects. Members of the University were appointed to be responsible for a particular part of the collection in a role akin to a present-day curator. A yearly stock-check would occur, with a commitment to replace an object if it was damaged, destroyed or stolen. The story goes: as annual inspections happened, the condition of the dodo specimen slowly degraded. By 1755, the group took a look at the dusty bird and unanimously voted to discard it. Despite the reality that no living dodos could be found by the end of the 1600s, the specimen was thrown on top of a fire with

Musaeum Tradescantianum catalogue, 1656

other decayed specimens, destined to undergo a second ritual extinction. An unidentified hero at the scene then realised the folly of this action, and managed to pull the bird out of the flames, saving only its head and foot. These specimens now survive in the collection of the natural History Museum. There, curator Malgosia nowak-Kemp notes that this version of the dodo’s downfall gained traction as a result of a mistranslation of latin records of the university: a phrase for describing the inspection process was instead understood as meaning fire. it was more likely that the head and foot were the only parts worth keeping as the specimen degraded by rough handling in damp spaces in lambeth and Oxford. Back in Mauritius, a Dutch sea captain noted “even a long boiling would scarcely make them tender, but they remained tough and hard, with the exception of the breast and belly, which were very good”.

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The dodo beside a small fire,in Alice in wonderland, Walt Disney Productions, 1951

PArrHOTs AnD OWWls

According to the University of Oxford archives, James O’shea began work on the museum facade in late 1858, assuming the role of sole carver. The choice of what window to work on was dictated by and dependent on the location of the building contractor’s scaffold, with O’shea ducking and diving around an active construction site on limited timeframes. A decision had been taken in the inter-ests of budget restraints that the jambs of the upper windows were to be left uncarved. O’shea, however, proceeded with this work, and appealed to Henry Acland and John ruskin for this carving to continue. Once O’shea carved extra on one window, he knew he was likely committing the University to unforeseen expenditure. To insure a sense of continuity on the facade, all the jambs on twelve first floor windows would then have to be carved. An undated letter from O’shea sometime in autumn 1859 states his position:

i am afraid that this gentleman is a fraid that those orniments will cost too much money – but the Price of the window without tuching those jambs would be £9 and would be very cheap carving – if i was to Doo all the upper windows i would carv evry Jamb for nothing for the sake of art a lone – rather than lave them.

The same letter incorporates a sketch for a window to feature monkeys playfully located around its arch. Considering O’shea’s penchant of never making working drawings for his carving, this sketch instead may have been intended as a suggestion for Acland and the new institution to adopt a progressive stance around human evolution. TH Huxley, the enfant terrible of Victorian science, had been giving lectures about ape ancestors, while Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was soon to be pub-lished in november 1859. These were radical ideas undermining theological belief, and the appearance of monkeys on the new museum facade would have been an endorsement of these discoveries. O’shea began work, but soon his monkeys were seen and objected to, probably by long-time Master of University College Oxford, Frederick Charles Plumptre. Plumptre was involved in the restoration of several churches and was a member of the museum building committee. About to be inaugurated as president of the Oxford Architectural society for a third term in office, he most likely did not want to be the focus of a scandal with O’shea’s monkeys. Pressure was applied from above for O’shea to change the carving and the conversion of roughly blocked monkeys into cats provided a solution. since known as The Cat Window, some of the felines are scrawny, their ribs protruding from skinny flanks. Others are well fed, carrying fish and birds in their mouths. Many of the cat carvings have glass eyes, suggesting that O’shea might

have been imitating the false eyes of taxidermy specimens he saw around Oxford (Another possible influence might be the tradition of galleting, where small pieces of glass were pressed into wet mortar on the front of cottages and farmhouses. Once sunshine hit the building, the glass would sparkle and add variety to typically downtrodden structures. O’shea might have enjoyed the transposition of this vernacular form of decoration onto a prominent civic building). yet, elements of the window carving are incomplete and the shape and form of the cats seem to still portray aspects of monkey anatomy. Ambi-guity has always appealed to the artisan, whether to train perception, stir confusion, or evoke appre-ciative pleasure, ideals O’shea might have valued as a pragmatic way of keeping some of his original intentions intact as he was forced to comply with orders from above. naturally enough, he probably felt aggrieved at the transgression of the belief system where a carver has a free hand in the design and execution of his work. According to Acland’s account of this event, written years later in 1893, the censorship of carving greatly frustrated O’shea. He had completed monkey carvings in Trinity College and his photographic portfolio featured them. As a prominent part of his oeuvre he must have wanted to present a monkey to the Oxford public. According to Acland, reported intolerable behaviour by O’shea led to his dismissal and the abandonment of The Cat Window. nonethe-less, he stayed onsite, and began another unsanc-tioned carving above the main entrance doorway. Acland recalls he “found O’shea on a single ladder in the porch wielding heavy blows as one imagines Michael Angelo might have struck when he was blocking out the design of some immortal work”. When he asked O’shea what he was doing, O’shea continued to hammer on, furiously shouting “Parrhots and Owwls! Parrhots and Owwls! Members of Convocation!” As a last act, Acland intervened

and meditatively asked O’shea to destroy the heads of each carving, “Their heads went. Their bodies not yet evolved, remain to testify to the humour, the farce, the woes, the troubles in the character and art of our irish brethren.” The story often appears in printed matter generated by the natural History Museum and is mentioned in publications about the history of Oxford. Phillip Opher’s Oxford Sculpture, An Illustrated Guide to nearly 1000 years of Oxford’s stone and wood architectural carvings, churches and chapel memorials, monumental brasses, and public sculpture, from norman times to the present notes that “The O’sheas were thrown off the job for some disrespectful caricatures of the senior staff of the museum, and for spending too long at lunch, drinking guinness.”

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illustration from The Architect, 4 May 1872

Detail of O’shea’s glass eyes

Blair J gilbert’s 2009 article ‘Puncturing an Oxford Myth: the Truth about the “infamous” O’sheas and the Oxford University Museum’ suggests Acland’s account is romanticised and is a story repeated until it achieved canonical status:

sadly, though delightful, it is not true. if it has any Darwinian connection, it is that of a creationist myth. Acland had greatly embellished the facts and theatre of what was undeniably an interesting thirty-four-year-old story… What probably began as an amusing anecdote in a speech by Acland was repeated and eventually written down and became fact… Many people today assume that the rough blocking on the inner arch above the entryway is the place where O’shea was attempting his protest and carving the owls and parrots. That appears to be another myth.

gilbert’s essay, which comprehensively looks at carvings completed by John and James O’shea and Edward Whelan in the museum’s interior, goes on to claim that the rough carving visible on the inner arch above the doorway is a remnant of another decorative scheme by John Hungerford Pollen, a designer associated with the Pre-raphaelite brotherhood. in 1860, after the Parrhots and Owwls incident, Pollen proposed a design that was partly executed by sculptor Thomas Woolner before funds ran out and it was left uncompleted. Of the detail there today, Woolner managed to place Adam and Eve on either side of the doorway, with flowers, thorns and fruit ascending to meet an angel. When looking closely at Pollen’s plan, a band of stonecarving was to be executed along the inner arch on the right. Formally, this initially seems to correlate to the unfinished blocking now present. However, one could speculate that elements of Pollen’s plan were necessitated by having to cover up the unkempt blocking caused by the Parrhots and Owwls incident of the previous year. Close inspection of the arch reveals a clear formal relationship to Parrhots and Owwls. Three Parrhots and three Owwls can be seen. The heads of the Parrhots, while not fully formed, are still intact and have not been hacked off. Two Owwls have their heads removed, with aggressive indentations into the stone visible. On this basis Acland’s account, although exaggerated, would seem to be partially verifiable. if there was disagreement between carver and commissioners, it might have been long drawn out, an antagonism over a period of several months. O’shea may have thought of this situation as part of his freedom as a carver – perhaps it was up to him to agitate, hustle and argue for what he wanted on the facade. records uncovered by Frederick O’Dwyer show the O’sheas continued to be involved with Oxford, a version contradicting Acland’s account. Though the amount of carving slackened off by the end of

Design by John Hungerford Pollen

for the entrance doorway, c. 1860

1859, John and James returned at various intervals while also taking on work in norfolk, Manchester and possibly Dublin. Cousin Edward Whelan stayed in Oxford, working on the museum until summer 1861, and their families were recorded as being resident in Oxford in the 1860 census. Who knows? Perhaps a temporary dismissal did happen, before a reconciliation was made. Maybe a slow disenchantment with the restriction of carving led James to find work elsewhere. The core of an endeavour to confirm aspects of this past is to find ways to look at the uncompleted carvings and how they appear today. in the absence of clear factual information and verifiable trajectories, here are some interpretative options for the site:

1. in appearance Parrhots and Owwls bear a very minor resemblance to a representation of parrots and owls that cultivates notions of beauty and artisan integrity – it takes time on an initial encounter with the doorway for a similarity to be noticed, and recognition is assisted by a historical overview of the material evidence of O’shea’s activities. Despite his reported shouting while executing the piece and the near-heroic grandeur of his gesture, Parrhots and Owwls hardly emit a sense of impassioned beauty or colossal amazement. since the carvings avoid such overarching assessments, it places them as a challenge to the medieval scholasticism that pervaded gothic thinking, seeking a divine explanation for everything and resolving any contradiction through its systematic enquiry. “For it is evident”, Thomas Aquinas writes in the thirteenth century, “that everything in nature has a certain end, and a fixed rule of size and growth”. Thus, representations of parrots and owls may differ from one another in size and shape, but if the variations go beyond certain limits there is no longer a true and proper nature, only a malformed one disregarded by authoritive interpretation.

2. While each Owwl head is now destroyed, the continued presence of Parrhot heads at the doorway begs the question: what kind of allegorical sound can each Parrhot voice? They speak to us through a complicated haze of history. Due to their unfinished status, their presence is irregular in pitch and volume. Whatever sound might be heard is reliant on how closely we engage and acknowledge their haphazard shapes. lend them an ear. The Parrhots spill out rhetorical syllables, made up of sounds taken from all those that they know: O’shea, Acland, ruskin, Plumptre, the Oxford museum-going public, you and i. rhythm and melody are disrupted, and the message of transgression O’shea wished for Parrhots to chirp lacks clarity. They may act as a glossolalia: a method of speaking in tongues, lacking any comprehension of meaning. Can the Parrhots and their heads be heard? Can Parrhots and Owwls be seen? Are they part of a scene? Are they obscene? in these uncertainties, the Parrhots seem to perversely uphold elements of O’shea’s work. Here, the presentation of animals in stone is not predicated on ideas of natural science as a reductive force based on survival of the fittest. such a conceit is jettisoned in favour of play, excessiveness, and associative digression.

3. With Adam and Eve in close proximity to O’shea’s stone, agnostic theory may come to the fore. Here, god made a mess in his job of creating the world; a half-finished bundle, full of voids and not entirely constituted. What’s left is a form of proto-reality, one dense in form and matter yet unable to synthesise into any clear narrative or version of truth. in considering the imperfect knowledge

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Parrhot

Parrhot

Parrhot

Owwl’s Head

Owwl’s Head

Owwl

Owwl

Owwl

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and limited recall around the making of Parrhots and Owwls, what remains is not an optimal decision completed by a clear rationality. rather, Parrhots and Owwls is a sacrificial compromise between unresolved conflicting constraints; O’shea’s fury, the governance of the University of Oxford and Acland’s mediation all participate in its making. As renderings in stone, Parrhots and Owwls are not only incomplete or partly defaced representations. Ontologically one could go so far as to say Parrhots and Owls are an exclusion, mute characters rendered negatively onto the site. As for The Cat Window, there is one more possible link to consider, as found in the legend of the gubbaun soar. The gubbaun is a village craftsman who wanders the countryside using his skills as a builder, often fashioning fantastical monuments. While the story was written down and published by irish mystic and Berkley professor Ella young in 1927, it may well have been known to James O’shea through aural traditions of his craft. young recounts the gubbaun:

Walking at his will, he came to a place where a great chief’s dune was a-building. The folk that fashioned it were disputing and arguing among themselves.

“it is right”, said one who had an air of authority and a red cloak on him; “it is right that on this lintel there should be an emblem to show the power of the dune – an emblem to put loosening of joints and terrors upon evil-doers.”

“it is more fitting”, said another, “that the man who carves the emblem should be honoured in it.”

“nay”, said a third, “that the man who raised the stone should be honoured in it. i myself should be honoured.” so the clash of tongues and opinions went on.

“The blessing of the sun, and the colours of the day to you”, said the gubbaun. “Have you work for a Craftsman?”

“What Craftsman are you?” said they, “that come hither a-begging? The world runs after the Master-Craftsman – we have no need of bunglers!”

“i am a Master-Craftsman.”

“Hear him!” cried they all. “Where are your apprentices? What dunes have you built? What jewels have you carved? Tell us that!”

“A man with ill-cobbled brogues, and burrs in his coat – a likely lie!”

“Put me to the proof”, said the gubbaun, “set me a task!”“so vagrants talk”, said the man in the red cloak, “while good men sweat at labour. Have you the hands of a mason?”

“What need to waste wit and words on this churl?” cried another.

“it is time now to stretch our limbs in the sun, and to eat. let us go to the stream where the cresses are.”

They went.

When they were well out of the way, the gubbaun took his tools. He worked with a will. The work was finished when they straggled back.

The first that caught sight of it cried out: the cry ran from man to man of them. There was hand-clapping and amazement.

The gubbaun had carved the King-Cat of Keshcorran – more terrible than a tiger! The Cat crouched midway in the lintel, and on either side of him spread a tail, a tail worthy that royal One! Bristling with fierceness it spread; it slid along on either side, with insinuating grace and with infinite cunning, losing itself at the last in loops, and twists, and foliations and intricacies that spread and returned and established themselves in a mysterious, magical, spell-knotted forest of emblems behind the flat-eared threatening head.

“There is an emblem for the Builder in that”, said the gubbaun, “and an emblem for the Carver, and an emblem for the Man who planned the Dune, and for the Earth that gave the stone for it. is it enough?”

“it is enough, O Master-Craftsman, our Choice you are! Our treasure! stay with us. The chief seat in our assembly shall be yours. The chief voice in our council shall be yours. stay with us, royal Craftsman.”

“i have the wisdom of running water and growing grass”, said the gubbaun, “and my feet must carry me further – still water is stagnant! May every day bring laughter to your mouths and skill to your fingers; may the cloaks of night bring wisdom.”

He left them.

Often he was wandering after that when the sun was proud in the sky – and often drank honey-mead in Faery-Mounds. He saw the Mountain-sprites dancing.

The King-Cat of Keshcorran? in irish myth the King-Cat was one of a group of grotesque animals to be found at caves in County roscommon and sligo, each reputed to be ‘The Hellmouth Door of ireland’. Perhaps O’shea, having been rebutted by Oxford authorities for his attempted monkey carvings, decided to not arbitrarily choose cats as the form for his monkeys to morph into. Could he have remembered the story of the gubbaun and his carving of the keeper of Hell, and asserted to bring forth evil monstrous cats to the facade of the museum?

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1971

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MOrE sTOnE COnTrOVErsiEs (1)

A story heard in 2012: a stonecarver in london was called to treat a weathered carving of a lionhead high up on a building. As it looked out over the street for hundreds of years, the carving had slowly eroded; his once-proud face now faded away by wind and rain. it was decided to replace him with a replica, a new carving based on how he might have looked back in his heyday. Work began, with funds supplied by the london Olympics: the building was on a specially-designated route that ViPs and executives would take in chauffeur-driven cars from hotels in Mayfair to the stadium in the east, and so qualified for an upgrade. soon, a clay mock up of the carving was complete and Olympic organisers came to the carver’s studio. They examined the proposed restoration before voicing concerns: why were so many teeth showing? Could the lion be friendlier? The sculptor made alterations, fattening up the lips to ease the presence of the offending molars. A second studio visit resulted in a more stringent request: get rid of the teeth altogether, they presented an overt sense of aggression that could never be part of a contemporary civic celebration. The final mock-up, then carved in stone and placed up high in the building, featured no teeth and a subordinated grin of regulation.

noel sheridan, Everybody Must Get Stonesinstallation view, royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 2001

Wall texts, stones on the gallery floor

UlriCH rüCKriEMExHiBiTiOn AT MODErn ArT OxFOrD, 1976PrEPArATOry AnD insTAllATiOn iMAgEs

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MOrE sTOnE COnTrOVErsiEs (2)

Rosc, translated from the irish language as ‘the poetry of vision’, or ‘a gleam in the eye’, was the first attempt at a comprehensive exhibition series of international modern art in ireland. it was initially presented in Dublin in 1967. The selection jury, comprising of James Johnson sweeney (Houston Museum of Fine Arts), William sandberg (director of Amsterdam’s museums) and Jean leymarie (louvre, Paris), were impressed by the relationship between ancient irish art and modern painting. As part of the exhibition five stone artefacts were to be transferred from sites around the countryside to be exhibited in Dublin, including the Tau Cross, a T-shaped piece of carved limestone located in Killnaboy, County Clare. some experts of the time believed the cross to be of the late Celtic iron Age of 200 BC, while others suggested it to be 12th century romanesque. Two carved heads appear upon the transom. They look in opposite directions, a Janus-like arrangement peering simultaneously to the future and past. such symbolism appealed to the sensibilities of the rosc jury, and a plan was announced to move the cross. The Clare Champion’s editorial considered the idea as cultural imperialism, and deplored the removal of the cross from its place in a local field to be seen “in synthetic surroundings by the cocktail party set in Dublin”. The situation escalated to frontpage news with the disappearance of the cross from its location at roughan Hill in early november, when members of the local community covertly removed and hid the cross, preventing its transportation to rosc. Fearing similar reactions nationwide, a police presence was placed on the Carndonagh Cross near Buncrana, another artefact proposed to be moved. Eventually, after a standoff of thirteen days involving a heavy media presence reporting from Killnaboy, three local youths, Pat Fogarty (19), gerard Curtis (22) and his brother, Michael (19), went to the place where the cross was hidden, covered with hay and a layer of small stones on top. it was taken back to its site and cemented back in place, a process documented by press photographer Padraig Kennelly. A statement from the men said:

We took it on Wednesday night, the holy day, about 4 a.m. We had to use a chisel to prise it loose but we were very careful and we moved it in a car protected with sacks to a sand-pit four miles away. The three of us are members of the Killnaboy youth Club and we felt that our parish is having a rough time with migration to the cities. The Tau Cross is the most distinctive feature of Killnaboy and we need it here. We could not allow someone in Dublin to just take it away. By taking it the entire parish was bonded together and already we feel a great increase in parish pride here. We decided to bring it back now, at this stage, because not only local opinion but national opinion as well will prevent it ever being moved again.

The cross was swiftly dispatched to the exhibition hall in Dublin the next day.

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MOrE sTOnE COnTrOVErsiEs (3)

like many gothic buildings throughout Europe, the 11th century Cathédrale saint-Jean-Baptiste in lyon features hundreds of gargoyles and grotesques upon its facade. These stone carvings have had numerous allegorical functions assigned to them over hundreds of years. in French Catholicism, the story goes that saint romain saved the rouen region from a monster called gargouille, a seventh century dragon with batlike wings, a long neck, and the ability to breathe fire from its mouth. There are multiple versions of the story, all ending with romain capturing, killing and setting fire to the creature. its head and neck would not burn due to being tempered by its own fire breath, so romain mounted its remains on the wall of a newly-built church to scare off evil spirits. soon, the style took off and was replicated in stone by carvers throughout gaul, each representative of demons being destroyed and cast out. such stories see gargoyles and grotesques as subservient victims of the rough and tumble Christian imperialisms of the time. yet, as entities cast out of the singularity of Catholic faith, they become carriers of the gothic tradition of otherness, open to a plurality of belief systems, adaptable in shape and form as years go by. since August 2010, lyon’s cathedral has a new addition – a gargoyle remarkably similar to Ahmed Benzizine, a Muslim foreman who had been restoring churches and cathedrals in France for the previous forty years and was due to retire later that year. Carver Emmanuel Fourchet decided to immortalise his boss in stone. “it could have been the face of a Portuguese man or anyone else but it happens to be an Algerian Muslim Arab – my friend Ahmed”, he said. The incident soon began to appear in the international media, with newspapers reporting that many had praised the initiative as a unifying “ecumenical gesture.” yet, the carving sparked cries of blasphemy among more conservative elements of the churchgoing community, who sent angry letters of complaint. An anti-immigration youth group, Jeunes identitaires lyonnais, also issued a statement: “While in many Muslim countries, the Christian faith is forbidden and Christians martyred, in lyon, Muslims have the luxury of quite calmly taking possession of our churches with the complicity of the Catholic authorities.” “let those who criticise it tear it down, i don’t see the problem”, said Mr Benzizine. “Perhaps it should be taken as a symbol for young Arabs from the suburbs that to integrate you need to get involved.” local clergy also dismissed the right-wing criticism. The cathedral’s Father Cacaud said: “They didn’t ask me for my explicit authorisation but when they told me about this friendly nod to Ahmed, i was very happy. if i took these people who are so offended by this beautiful gesture on a tour of the cathedral, i could show them gargoyles that would shock them far more, ones that are frankly erotic.”

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MOrE sTOnE COnTrOVErsiEs (4)

Vermiculation is an architectural decorative pattern where irregular holes and tracts are carved onto a facade, intended to represent worms eating their way through the stone, collapsing a building into rubble and ruin. The effect points to the impermanence of architecture, and that all the institutions it houses will gradually crumble away. Prevalent in the nineteenth century and often called vermicelli rustification, the pattern is sometimes simulated in stucco on corner-stones or on keystones around a doorway, giving a bold texture to otherwise standardised surfaces and forms derived from classical principles. To find an origin for vermiculation, consider one of the first forms of architecture, the clay hut. Back then, wormtracts were visible on the surface of the building as worms weaved their way in and out of the earth that made up the structure. The sun’s rays then dried out the patterns, creating an ornamental effect for all to see. Over time, as western architecture utilised stone to make larger edifices with smoother, sanitised surfaces and flagging, vermiculation refused to be obsolete and was retained as part of the grammar of classical building as a referential

motif. in a decorative sense it might be a way of rethinking the composition of antiquated build-ings that, from today’s vantage point, can often seem austere in the streetscape. Moreover, it represents a valuable counter-point to symbolic representa-tions of power and authority that pervade the architecture of many western cities. it is difficult to speculate on the intentions behind the act of carving vermiculation, and de-tailed information is hard to find, perhaps as it is often considered marginal architectural decora-tion. Maybe the carver on the job thought of the pattern as an effec-tive piece of ornament, and did not concern himself with any allegorical intent. Conceivably the chief carver or foreman was aware of this symbolism and viewed it as a way of suggesting the organic growth and subse-quent decline of the built edifice. An architect may have seen vermiculation on a building in France or italy on his grand tour, and made a quick drawing of the pattern alongside impres-sions of classical orders and Whitehall, london

proportion. years later, he rediscov-ered that page with vermiculated pattern in an old sketchbook, and drew it into the blueprints for a new commission. Everyone might have copied a much-admired building up the road and slightly varied the pattern, adding to vermiculation’s mystique as a mutating virus, stylis-tically different in various locations but all the time pointing to inevi-table decay. Vermiculation is seen on many domestic dwellings of the nineteenth century. A survey of the pattern in london would yield thousands of sites affected. in Oxford, it appears on the gate into the city’s Botanic gardens, designed by sculptor nicholas stone in 1633. The O’sheas walked past it early on workdays as they fetched plants to later

carve up on their scaffold. Moreover, vermic-ulation’s allegorical intent plays out on the surface of buildings that represent state and institutional apparatus. sites of encounter include perimeter walls of the now defunct Crumlin road Courthouse and gaol in Belfast along with many bank buildings in glasgow. in london, versions of the pattern can be spotted at the entrance to the Architectural Association on Bedford square and liberally spread across government buildings at White-hall that house HM revenue and Customs Headquarters and the Department of Culture, Media and sport. run quickly through the arch onto Pall Mall, avoiding the clumps of prominent vermiculation above your head that threaten to collapse the structure. Panels in front of the institute of Contemporary Arts nearby carry the pattern. in Dublin, the irish stock Exchange on Angelsea street, opened in 1859 as the city’s chamber of commerce, has strips of vermiculation on its granite

facade. At such a site, where speculation of financial markets is the day’s work, the pattern might be cast as an unnoticed omen of the neoliberal collapse and loss of irish economic sovereignty in late 2010. in considering vermiculation as an accursed fossil, a dried-out motif imper-fect within the mainframe of architectural propriety and institutionalised finan-cial speculation, a kinship is found in the pages of Manual De landa’s A Thousand Years of nonlinear History. Written in 1997, the notion of mineralization is a central conceit for De landa, where initially casual activities in urban centres gradually build and solidify into the pillared values of market economy:

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Architectural Association, london

Angelsea street, Dublin

Banks and stock exchanges emerged first as informal practices, becoming institutions as the rules that governed them hardened into formal procedures. Only later on did these institutional practices became ‘mineralized’ as banks and exchanges acquired their own buildings. For example, stocks on government loans circulated throughout the commercial hierarchies (ie, big fairs) as early as the fourteenth century. Early stock exchanges were like the upper echelons of fairs, only operating permanently, originally simply as daily meetings of wealthy merchants and brokers at a given spot in many medieval cities. By the time special buildings were built to house these meetings, they had already developed formal rules for conducting their transactions. This, while the exchange at Antwerp was in existence by 1460, its mineralization did not occur until 1518. And a similar point can be made about banks, which emerged as dispersed practices, whether of money lenders or the services that merchant companies performed for each other, later evolving into separate institutions in Florence around the fourteenth century.

James O’shea may have returned to Dublin in 1861, and a series of carvings on the new Kildare street Club are frequently attributed to him. One still-notorious carving on the site lampoons the building’s function as a leisure club for the Anglo-irish Ascendancy, an institution of card playing and sherry drinking with a reputation as the only place in ireland where decent caviar could be had. its members were described as having an oyster-like capacity for understanding one thing: that they should continue to get fat in the bed in which they were born. With this in mind, three monkeys were rendered playing billiards around a tiny stone table complete with cues, a rest, balls and pockets. Other depictions on the facade are less associative with the club members, and have been variously described as a bear playing a guitar (or maybe a serenading shrew), a hound chasing a rabbit (possibly a fox chasing a hare), polar bears deciding to confront a harpoon-wielding mariner, a snake and a frog, lizards, mice, more rabbits, a hen, a dragon (could be a phoenix) and a dolphin. The carvings on Kildare street were the subject of a column by Myles na gCopaleen in the Irish Times of 1954. He criticised a riddle often heard around Dublin:

Where in Dublin can you see monkeys playing billiards on the street?

na gopaleen answered by reminding readers of the mimetic values of art:

i am not trying to be rude: i am really probing at an aesthetic problem. i have minutely examined the carvings. The characters engaged in play are not monkeys, and they are not playing billiards… the old-timers did not bother about how the monkeys were constructed – they just remembered monkeys knowing that every beholder would merely remember. There you have the intrusion of art.

lEFT TO rOAM

The Oxford Museum was the scene, at its public inauguration in June 1860, of a celebrated debate on evolution between the Bishop of Oxford, samuel Wilberforce and ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ TH Huxley. Huxley famously responded to a belittling remark of the bishop’s by saying: “i should be sorry to demolish so eminent a prelate, but for myself i would rather be descended from an ape than from a divine who employs authority to stifle the truth.” The incident helped identify the museum as the site of a new secularism in Oxford, one holding many resonances with the story of the O’sheas. Their work could well be considered central to these debates. Their carvings may be understood not only as a decorative scheme, but as having a didactic purpose to the public who encounter it to this day. yet, ruskin’s 1877 slade lectures at the Oxford Museum dismissed the work of the O’sheas as a misinterpretation of gothic ideals:

in saying that ornament should be founded on natural form, i no more meant that a mason could carve a capital by merely looking at a leaf, than a painter could paint a Madonna by merely looking at a young lady. And when i said that the workman should be left free to design his work as he went on, i never meant that you should secure a great national monument of art by letting loose the first lively irishman you could get hold of to do what he liked in it.

ruskin continued to speak of James O’shea:

He was a man of true genius, and of the kindest nature. not only the best, but the only person who could have done anything of what we wanted to do here. But, he could have done anything of it after many years of honest learning; and he too easily thought in the pleasure of his first essays that he had nothing to learn. The delight of the freedom and power which would have been the elements of all health to a trained workman were destruction to him, and the more that he would have studied, there was none to teach him… i hoped he would find his way in time, but hoped, as so often in vain.

The O’shea brothers carved on Manchester Assize Courts, designed by Alfred Waterhouse and completed in 1864. The building was damaged during World War ii and subsequently demolished. its replacement, now Manchester Crown Court, incorporated salvaged O’shea carvings into a museum space, located in the basement of the building. Today, with budget cutbacks in the court services, the museum is rarely opened. Most prominent behind the locked door of the room are the grim humour of ‘The Punishment Capitals’, once positioned at the main entrance doorway of Waterhouse’s building. scenes detail a variety of medieval torture techniques, each with an introductionary slogan: ye Punishment by Weight, ye stocks, ye Pillory, Torture by pouring water down ye throat, For scolding Women, saxon Hanging, ye guillotine, and ye Punishment of ye Wheel.

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He also noted the advantage monkeys have at playing billards, as the rules of the game do not say what may be done with the tail. similar metaphysical leanings arise with na gCopaleen’s other pseudonym, Flann O’Brien, in his 1967 novel The Third Policeman. There, a theory about the life of atoms is described and enacted at length. A condemned murderer, the local constabulary and an eccentric scientist each speculate on how the world is construed, deconstructed, reconstituted and navigated. scenarios appear that deal with how substance and physical matter are generated and organised:

“Did you ever study atomics when you were a lad?” asked the sergeant, giving me a look of great enquiry and surprise.“no” i answered.“That is a very serious defalcation”, he said, “but all the same i will tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geomet-rical figures too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go.”

Atomic theory forces local police to keep surveillance on possible side effects of individuals having prolonged contact with objects. A man who mounts his bicycle for an hour a day for, say ten years, will suffer from a condition where he takes on the characteristics of a bicycle, as atoms are exchanged each day through saddle and crotch.

you can tell it unmistakably from his walk. He will walk smartly always and never sit down and he will lean against the wall with his elbow out and stay like that all night in his kitchen instead of going to bed. if he walks too slowly or stops in the middle of the road he will fall down in a heap and will have to be lifted and set in motion again by some extraneous party.

in 1983 a monument appeared on the summit of Carauntoohil, ireland’s highest mountain. Consisting of a bicycle raised up on an iron pole with a plaque dedicated to O’Brien and The Third Policeman, its appearance went unno-ticed outside of the local climbing community until a letter and photograph were printed by the irish Times in 1986. Written by JJ Toomey of Cork, it detailed his encounter with the monu-ment that had since disappeared. Toomey appealed to the newspaper’s readership for further information and shortly after, he received a note and photographs from one sabine schmidt of Hattenheim, germany, detailing the installation of the monument by her and a male accomplice. They were assisted by Dublin climber Michael Kellett, who carried

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the bicycle up the Devil’s ladder ravine for the couple after finding them weighed down on the steep ascent. An overarching theme of these events is the metanarrative of Christianity supplanted by an unsanctioned action spurred on by nar-rative strains of O’Brien’s writing. The ges-ture to place a monument on the summit was preceded in the 1950s by the erection of a wooden crucifix at what was perceived as the nearest place in ireland to heaven. its rapid disintegration in the harsh mountaintop climate resulted in a steel replacement in 1976, invol-ving a religious procession up the mountain and the placement of a wind-driven turbine to power lights attached to a new illuminated cross, intended to be visible from a great dis-tance. The lights and turbine mechanism had since been blown away, leaving an empty iron

pole that the monument to Flann then colonised. The bicycle’s appearance caused jovial speculation between members of Tralee Mountaineering Club: was it to be used as a generator for a new lighting system on the cross? subsequently, the bicycle made an involuntary descent after a two-month residence on the summit. local accounts describe the monument’s demise as being the work of either “mindless vandals” or “feckin purists”. Current reconnaissance suggests that the bike might be buried beneath rocks further down the mountain. reading between the lines of the Atomic Theory, one might speculate that the whole mountain has, since 1983, shared in a molecular exchange with the buried bicycle through their physical contact over time. if the bicycle was once intended to be the monument, maybe now the entire mountain can be a dedication to O’Brien? A system of interpretation was suggested by JJ Toomey in recent correspondence:

Apropos atomic theory, you may be interested in my personal view, based on Vedic theories of consciousness being the basic fundamental aspect of all creation and existence. This viewpoint considers consciousness permeates all, in a quite diffuse strength in solid materials, from mountains to bicycles, to a more concentrated, stronger, ascending degree in the animal chain, culminating most densely in human beings. if such is the case, it seems to provide a better basis for some exchange between bicycle and policeman than a plain atomic exchange theory. 

With both monkeys playing billiards and the bicycle lost on the mountain, the tradition of the public monument as a chronicle of man and his historical achievements is negated. instead, established belief systems can be challenged, and mediations on the history of matter-energy and the interaction of forms might occur – one thing touches another thing that in turn is touching everything else, all interconnected as a formless whole.

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Carauntoohil, 23 May 1983

THings COUlD HAVE BEEn OTHErWisE

JOsEPH BEUys in COnVErsATiOn WiTH FlAnn O’BriEn, MODErATED By MiCHAEl DEMPsEy

DUBlin CiTy gAllEry THE HUgH lAnE, sOMETiME 14 FEBrUAry 1940 – 15 OCTOBEr 1974 – 14 FEBrUAry 2014

FOB it began with the hedge schools they say… all that classical

learning and then Heidegger looking to sophocles and you looking to Ulysses i suppose? That fellow messing things up to get at the thing itself, stop explaining and just walk and your walk will have revolution.

JB When the O’shea brothers left there was a trail of dust – not so much with me. There was very little dust left despite my persistence in explaining and drawing diagrams.

FOB That’s what you get for explaining things in the meantime. it’s the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered.1

MD After your 1974 lecture at the Municipal gallery in Dublin was there a sense of revolution evolving?

JB There were a lot of angry artists. But movement comes about through a provocation, through an inauguration, through an initiation into the purpose of movement. One creates something. The principle of movement itself. And here other influences become apparent – will and energy.2

FOB A concern with heat and temperature and their relationship to energy and work. i have a theory about that!

MD is this the potential for a political movement? A Utopia? Or art as idea, or cultural identity?

FOB Thermodynamics.

JB no i would say it is the expanded concept of art. it’s here and now.

FOB i remember a summer spin up north, Hill had invited me to his beloved Tory 3 to see the bloody painters, i stopped to have a breath in sight of Errigal and opened the car boot for the sand-wiches, but all those pages flew in the movement of the wind. scattered and re-edited by a moment’s lack of will it became the book… the one about a bicycle.

JB For me it was the crashing of my stuka. As far out as one can go, before losing it.

MD Why did you choose ireland?

JB it was Mr ireland that invited me. Caroline and i were working on the show for Modern Art Oxford with nick serota. i liked the association with academia. All that knowledge preserved and fossilised in its petrified state, dormant but there to be awoken. in the Ark museum, on south lambeth road, you can see a dodo.

FOB Travel does elongate the time… dass ich mein Herz / in Heidelberg verloren. The Plain People of ireland: isn’t german very like irish?… Very guttural and so on? The work of the O’sheas can still be seen on the Museum Building in Trinity College, and after Oxford, they came back dragging their monkey tails behind them to the Kildare street Club.

JB A very obliging young curator named Oliver Dowling drove us around in his car – everywhere. north + south, East + West. We were so lost to irish signage. Maybe that is why i decided to call the show The Secret Block For a Secret Person in Ireland?

MD it would seem a curator’s evolvement goes well beyond installing art exhibitions and caring for works of art. now we are expected to do a lot more – finding peat briquettes and kerrygold 4 … We have become intermediaries between producers of art and the structures of power within our society. your blackboards caused quite a stir when you left them in Dublin.

Frontpage of The Irish Times, 28 June 1977

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JB yes… at first i wondered… did they know my gift… it was left dormant for three years in Chamber’s basement. But then a committee was formed, an advisory committee and they had to be heard. Poor Ethna, she had a fight. But she held firm and her manager supported her.5

MD Curators mediate the experience of art by selecting what is represented, contextualise and frame the production of artists and their works.

FOB (aloud) The Museums will transform into entertainment centres…

MD so where is the site for art? As art in museums morphs from elitism to democracy, the hole deepens between conventional exhibition making and new ideas about relational aesthetics. is this your revolution?

JB Where are the bees of Europe? There is a decline along with the disappearance of collective ideologies of social transfor-mation. They have become unwell with the Varroa mite along with the rise of pollution and the collapse of the political and aesthetic sensation.

FOB To be a pilgrim in search of a future elsewhere, always another project, perhaps a better more ambitious project, is a failure to notice the rhythm of the immediate environment.

JB There is a balance between creativity and criticism – as the Doctor Faustus implied – much rebellion in strict obedience is needed – but perhaps there is a danger of becoming uncreative? i would like very much to set up a Free international University here to be the brain of Europe.

MD Through the historical there is a linear narrative – all production processes take place over time.

JB it is also a chain. Art is not a truth or a reality of something or something that took place in the past, like my blackboards for instance, it is something that happens and in its turn it stirs the production of other things, a form that is capable of producing future forms.

FOB is that why they let those kids loose with chalk and do their rubbings?

JB To draw a line is to have an idea… to pass on lehmbruck’s flame for the future.

MD in her essay, ‘selected nodes in a network of Thoughts on

sean lynch, Reconstruction of Irish Energies, 2007Peat briquettes, Kerrygold butter, 19 x 7 x 12cm

5 After his lecture in Dublin, Beuys left blackboards, complete with chalk drawings illustrating his ideas, with the Municipal gallery. The blackboards were put in storage, until 1977 when curator Ethna Waldron decided to put them on exhibition. The display of blackboards caused some consternation at a meeting of the Cultural Committee of Dublin Corporation. The committee’s concerns hinged both on the eligibility of the blackboards as works of

art, and also the difficulties of conservation of the delicate chalk drawings. Councillor

PJ O’Mahony said, “i have seen the piece of alleged art. if a piece had been rubbed out and a child added chalk marks to it, i

doubt if the artist would know it.” Councillor Alice glenn declared, “i believe a man has

to watch it all the time because kids are coming in from school and rubbing bits out and adding new bits.” The Committee called

for the immediate removal of the blackboards. Dublin City Manager J B Molloy refused their request, and the blackboards remained on show. source: Irish Times, 27 – 29 June 1977.

6 Maria lind, ‘selected nodes in a network of Thoughts on Curating’ in Carin Kuoni (editor), words of wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art, new york, 2001.

7 Sleepwalkers is an investigational programming format based on ‘exhibition making’ – What is an exhibition? How does the form of an exhibition come into being?

six artists – Clodagh Emoe, lee Welch, sean lynch, linda quinlan, gavin Murphy,

Jim ricks – used gallery 8 at Dublin City gallery The Hugh lane to develop their ideas and materials into six separate site-specific installations exhibited in 2012, 2013 and 2014. The artists worked with curators Michael Dempsey, logan sisley and Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll. A blog documented the process at http://hughlane.wordpress.com

8 O’Brien, ibid. 9 “We are not in the world; we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become

universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero. This is true of all the arts…

Art does not have opinions. Art undoes the triple organisation of perceptions, affections and opinions in order to substitute a monument

composed of percepts, affects and blocks of sensations that takes the place of language. it is about listening.” gilles Deleuze and Félix guattari, what Is Philosophy? new york, 1994, pp 170 – 177.

10 Joseph Beuys, The Secret Block For a Secret Person in Ireland, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1974.

Curating’,6 Maria lind views art as being in “competition with other phenomena and means of understanding, the most complex and challenging form for processing the experience of being human”.

JB The analogy of Becoming, i find it intriguing in your sleepwalkers7

programme. But how can it start revolution if it’s not moving and is stuck in a gallery?

MD The themes explored were the complexities of relationships between individuals and institutions in an exchange transcending traditional inside / outside or unique / universal binaries. We wanted to create a space for self reflection or research and development or something – to stop the endless programming!

FOB Hell goes round and round. in shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.8

MD it’s not circular, but a simultaneous realisation of the constituent parts in the programme. There is no theme, no critical context, and no text. it is about finding a space and giving it significance. sleepwalkers is a perception not a process.9

JB … and so there is a chance for interchangeability formulated by novalis and goethe: if god could become man, then he could equally appear as a stone or plant or anything else. Have i explained my walking stick… it is a link between heaven and earth, spirit and matter (Warm time machine–warmth ferry-warmth sculpture-towards the future: sun state)…10

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1 Flann O’Brien in a letter to William saroyan, 14 February 1940.

2 ‘Joseph Beuys in conversation with Friehelm Mennekes’ in Joseph Beuys, Wilfried Wiegand, Klaus staeck et al, In Memoriam Joseph Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches, Bonn, 1986, p 33.

3 Tory island off the coast of Donegal is the unlikely home of a celebrated school of painters, who work in a primitive style and whose art is extremely sought after. The tradition of painting is relatively recent, and started after a local man commented, on looking at the work of a distinguished visiting artist, Derek Hill, that he could do just as well. He had a go, so did others and now there are regular exhibitions of Tory islanders all over the world.

4 “On leaving Dublin he asked me to stop and he went into a shop and came out with two bales of briquettes and some packets of butter which were carried into his hotel in limerick and then back to my car next morning and into his hotel in Cork and then back to the car the next morning. The first peat and butter sculptures were made in my car on the journey from Cork back to Dublin and he was delighted with himself – he had obviously been experimenting in his hotel rooms.” Oliver Dowling in Mike Fitzpatrick (editor), Sean Lynch: Retrieval unit, limerick City gallery of Art, 2007, p 66.

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A monkey is making his tamer jump through a hoopDetail of a catchpenny print entitled: le Monde renversé

Published by AF Hurez, Cambrai, France, 1817source: sgKJ / AgJMBorms

wood cutting a lumberjackDetail of a catchpenny print entitled: Verkehrte Welt

Published by Oehmigke & riemschneider, neuruppin, germany, c. 1860source: sgKJ / AgJMBorms

THE rEVErsED WOrlDFrEEK WAMBACq

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1 Hugh lane, ‘Prefatory notice’, Catalogue of the Exhibition of works by Irish Painters,

guildhall Art gallery, london, 1904, p ix. 2 lane, ‘Prefatory notice’, p x. 3 P C Connell, ‘An Abortive Enterprise and its Possible results’, Brush and Pencil, vol 15, no 3 (March 1905) p 176. 4 Hugh lane, ‘Appendix: note 1’, in sarah

Cecilia Harrison (editor), Municipal Gallery of Modern Art: illustrated catalogue with

biographical and critical notes, Municipal gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1908.

5 As Director of the Museum of science and Art, Plunkett had commissioned plaster

casts of medieval irish high crosses. in this case the copy is legitimated, although the history of plaster casts in museums and academies is not without controversy. see

for example Johannes siapkas, ‘genealogies’, in Johannes siapkas and lena sjögren,

Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity: The Petrified Gaze, routledge, new york, 2014,

pp 81 – 111.

science and Art.5 Plunkett hung photographs of the ‘Corot’ and a work by Mészöly at the entrance to the exhibition, in order to discredit the Prince’s gift.6 similarly the Irish Independent published reproductions of the two paintings so that its readers might judge for themselves.7 The evidence presented took the form of a black and white line drawing of each composition – copies mobilised to expose a copy. Even though experts at the time concluded that the work was by Corot, the gallery Committee decided to ask the Prince of Wales to transfer his name to another picture and presented the debated picture themselves, “so that the unpleasant recollection of this inartistic controversy might in no way be identified with the Prince’s gift”.8 The inauthentic was perceived as tainted, and furthermore had the power to pollute those with which it was associated. The idea that the copy, the inauthentic or the unoriginal taints or pollutes appears in the 1953 film Statues Also Die by Alain resnais, Chris Marker and ghislain Clocquet. The film critiques the place of African culture in European museums (including the Pitt rivers Museum in Oxford) and employs the concept of the authentic in relation to the global impact of European market values. The filmmakers argue that, in the wake of colonisation and tourism, economic requirements usurp religious imperatives and art becomes indigenous handicraft: “We buy their art, and degrade it.” 9 While this analysis has since been called into question for imposing a troublesome, Western notion of authenticity,10 Statues Also Die demonstrates that the transition from the world at large to the museum is never neutral: “Classified, labelled, conserved in the ice of showcases and collections, they enter into the history of art, paradise of forms where the most mysterious relationships are established.” 11 Or, as lynch puts it: “Objects in life, once free now conscripted, harden into institutional values that form the museum itself.” in both works too there are questions of translation – between cultures, between times, between materials. Both the statues in resnais, Marker and Clocquet’s film and the animals in lynch’s installation are mute; both works borrow from Psalm 135’s caution on the folly of idols: “They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see.” in lynch’s story, though, the O’sheas are grounded in the world, neither waiting for divine inspiration nor fearing divine retribution. “On their walks they had never come by any tidy story they had made of the world.” Originality and authenticity may seem like tidy concepts with fixed boundaries, yet the messy relationship to their apparent opposites, reveals otherwise, both inside and outside of the museum.

DEAD ringErs: THOUgHTs On AUTHEnTiCiTy AnD iTs OPPOsiTEs

lOgAn sislEy

The complex relationship between originals and their copies have generated anxiety, praise, wonder, delight, disappointment and fear. While the original object is usually venerated, anxiety can often surround the inauthentic or the copy, especially given the proliferation of technologies of reproduction since the industrial revolution. When Auguste rodin first exhibited his Age of Bronze in 1877 he was accused of casting from a live model, a practice frowned upon. in order to prove the originality of the work, he turned to another method of reproduction, commissioning gaudenzio Marconi to take photographs of the naked model, Auguste neyt. The sculpture itself was cast in bronze many times, all original copies, and Hugh lane paid rodin £200 for a cast for his new gallery of Modern Art (now Dublin City gallery The Hugh lane) which opened in 1908. Museums, generally, are repositories of authentic objects. This is heightened in art museums where authorship and uniqueness are prized (whereas natural history museums often collect multiple specimens). in the art world the exposure of fakes destabilises the authority of cultural institutions and the market, and frequently generates controversy. The successful circulation of fakes dupes the viewer and their exposure destroys trust and reputation. Within museums curatorial time and energy is devoted to confirming the legitimacy of objects both prior to and after their entry into the institution. This rigour can help guard against the distortion of history, but it also can produce forms of history that privilege or exclude certain narratives. in A blow by blow account of stone carving in Oxford, sean lynch reflects on how history is assembled and the role museums play through the story of the O’shea brothers, who in the 1850s travelled from ireland to Oxford to work on the new Museum of natural History. lynch uses a story about a museum’s physical construction to reflect on its ideological infrastructure. He unsettles ideas about authenticity, a concept applied to things of undisputed origin. The origins of the O’shea brothers themselves “seem obscure”, in contrast to the authenticity of their work, a product of their “uncorrupted native skill”. A similar language of purity and native irish creativity is found in Hugh lane’s narrative of the development of the arts in ireland. This he outlined at an exhibition of irish art at guildhall Art gallery, london, in 1904. He argued that the arts “were moving towards their perfect form when… the Anglo-norman invasion laid its forbidding hand…” so that painting did not develop from illumination but “as an offshoot of other nations”.1 lane’s gathering of irish painters was in part aimed at discovering their “common or race qualities” 2 although this was contested at the time.3

Encouraged by the guildhall venture, lane exhibited in Dublin a collection of works that would form the basis for the gallery that today bears his name (and where A blow by blow account of stone carving in Oxford was first exhibited). in 1905 a “violent controversy” 4 occurred over the authenticity of a painting by Corot (now attributed to géza Mészöly), which had been selected for purchase for the new gallery by the visiting Prince of Wales. Among those contesting the origins of the painting was lt-Colonel gT Plunkett, Director of the Museum of

THE HisTOry OF A rUssiAn DOll

BEn rOBErTs

The compulsion to gather collections together, to create a narrative from the apparently unconnected, is the root of the 17th Century wunderkammer. Proto museums such as these, in their original conception, were places for muses and musing; a combination of rigour and carefree extrapolations. Today, visitors continue to approach the museum in much the same spirit, as a source of didactic narratives. Museums in this sense are microcosms of geography and history; collections of multiple places and narratives arranged to suggest a particular history yet also allowing for infinite readings and connections for the curious. in the postmodern era, the great Victorian age of collecting long behind us, often it is the history of a collection itself as much as the objects it contains that command attention. The British Museum for example, with its history of controversies and cultural imperialism is often mired in the contemporary revisions of history. The narratives such collections suggest, and indeed how they came to be, are rarely objective or impartial. There are always alternate versions of these stories, sometimes unfashionable, uncomfortable or unloved but lurking in the background nonetheless. They are what sean lynch referred to as ‘subplots’ when discussing his 2007 exhibition Retrieval unit.

The subplot, the hidden history became relevant, as a way of seeing the world…i am interested in loose ends of stories, the footnotes that tend to get lost, and how to mediate their presence through shining a spotlight on them. What i find is often a peripheral story to the main event.1

in the John W Walter documentary How to Draw a Bunny 2 ray Johnson talks of a similar element within his practice he refers to as ‘moticos’. Johnson likens these small packets of material to the flashing glimpses between the cars of a passing freight train: a moment in which the majority of our vision is temporarily obscured, save for a tantalising sliver of detail at the edge of the image. He claimed they were everywhere in our daily life; all we needed to do was learn to see them and we’d be richer for it. lynch’s exhibition at Modern Art Oxford A blow by blow account of stone carving in Oxford, is a partial history of the museums in the city for which he has been glancing between the display cases of their collective story. However, evident though they are, it is neither a portrait of the Pitt rivers or the narrative evolution of how Tradescants’ collection came to be the current Ashmolean, that is the main attraction here. Within the rigour and elegance of this story telling, it is the articulation of the possible narratives wrapped within the objects and their histories which are most compelling. installed at Modern Art Oxford and free from the strictures of museological display, the interrelation, real and imagined between object, history and site stacks up like a russian Doll. A museum within an exhibition within an art gallery. From a south london chicken shop, via Dublin and the stone carving O’shea Brothers, to the partially-executed sculptures of Oxford’s natural History Museum portico – the whole implausible string of connections brought together in perfect sense on the site of an old

126 127

6 see Thomas Bodkin, Hugh Lane and his Pictures, Pegasus Press for the government of the irish Free state, c. 1932, p 15. see

also John Hutchison, ‘sir Hugh lane and the gift of the Prince of Wales to the Municipal gallery of Modern Art, Dublin’, Studies, Winter 1979, pp 277 – 287.

7 ‘Corot or no Corot’, Irish Independent, 12 May 1905, p 7.

8 Hugh P lane, ‘Appendix: note 1’, Illustrated Catalogue, Municipal gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1908, p 56

9 Alain resnais, Chris Marker and ghislain Clocquet, Les Statues Meurent Aussi (statues Also Die), Tadié-Cinéma-Production, 1953, c. 25:22.

10 see for example James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard University Press, 1988.

11 resnais, Marker and Clocquet, Statues Also Die, c. 19:40.

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brewery in Oxford. Here they are to be unpacked, puzzled over, and reconfigured in the mind of the visitor. But rather than become lost in this reflective labyrinth of narrative complexity, or even try to impose a new system upon it, lynch has found a way to tell the story of the museum, however extraordinarily, though its physical self; its objects and its site, and in doing so dissolve the tension between the history of a collection and the history which it chooses to describe.

1 ‘let’s have attitude rather than identity! sean lynch and Mike Fitzpatrick in conversation’, in Mike Fitzpatrick (editor), Retrieval unit, limerick City gallery of

Art, 2007, p 4. 2 John W Walter (director), How to Draw a Bunny, Elevator Pictures, 2002.

Above: Installation view at Modern Art Oxford, before carving by Stephen Burke and Andy Tanser begins

Preceding pages: Photographs detailing various stages of a stone carving by Stephen Burke

Installation views of sculptures and photographs at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane

Following pages: Installation views at Modern Art Oxford of a 35mm slide projection with voiceover, placed beside taxidermy owls of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Installation views of objects placed throughout the cafe and bookshop of Modern Art Oxford

Opposite top: A plastic sign, c. 1995, donated by Favorite Chicken & Ribs following renovations at the South Lambeth Road branch in early 2014

Opposite bottom: Documents from the Favorite business archive, from 1986 onwards

Above: Natural flint resembling a monkey’s head, artefact of the Pitt Rivers Museum

Overleaf: Various pieces of Favorite Chicken & Ribs packaging

Published on the occasion ofA blow by blow account of stonecarving in Oxford Sean LynchDublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 10 July – 29 September 2013Modern Art Oxford, 12 April – 8 June 2014

Featured is a printed version of a 35mm slide projection with scripted narration, alongside the artist’s research and contributions by Stephen Burke, Michael Dempsey, Ben Roberts, Logan Sisley, Simon Woodley and Freek Wambacq. Accompanying installation images record the placement of sculptures, photographs, archival material and projections in Dublin and Oxford.

Stonecarving: Stephen Burke, Andy TanserScript narration: Gina Moxley, Stephen Burke Slide projector synchronisation: Matt GidneyInstallation fabrication: Ray Griffin 35mm slide printing: Michael Dyer Associates, London Installation photography: Stuart Whipps, Ross KavanaghAdditional photography: Matt Gidney, Michael HollyPublication editor: Michele Horrigan Publication design: Wayne DalyPublication printing: Cassochrome, Beveren-Leie, BelgiumPublication distribution: Cornerhouse, ManchesterStone was supplied and sponsored by: The Bath Stone Group, Cotswold Natural Stone and McKeon Stone

Further acknowledgements: Alessio Antoniolli, Artisan Frames Clonmel, Michael Asbury, Benjamin de Burca, Andrew Cashin, Carl Doran, Mike Fitzpatrick, Rowan Geddis, Richie Healy, Ben Harman, Dan Hicks, John Holmes, Alexia Holt, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Niall Kavanagh, Jim Kennedy, Mary Lynch, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Patrick Murphy, Frederick O’Dwyer, Amanda Ralph, Mark Ranalow, Malgosia Nowak-Kemp, Nuno Sacramento and Dan Scully.

Research and production: Favorite Chicken & Ribs, Essex; Gasworks, London; University of the Arts TrAIN Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation, London; Cove Park, Scotland; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Particular thanks to Michele Horrigan, Paul Luckraft, Michael Stanley, Lawrence Taylor and Simon Woodley.

Image credits: Oxford University Museum Archives pp 69, 70, 72, 73, 91; Stephen Burke pp 75, 76, 77; Tom Fitzgerald p 79; Favorite Chicken & Ribs p 87; Jim Kennedy p 92; Liz and Japonica Sheridan pp 98 – 101; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin p 102; Modern Art Oxford pp 104 – 5; Kennelly Archive p 107; Agence France-Presse p 108; JJ Toomey pp 114, 116; Irish Times pp 115, 118

DUBLIN CIT y GALLERy THE HUGH LANEDirector: Barbara Dawson Deputy Director and Head of Collections: Margarita CappockGeneral Manager: Gráinne Kelly Head of Exhibitions: Michael DempseyHead of Security: Tim HaierExhibitions Curator: Logan Sisley Collections Curator: Jessica O’DonnellConservator: Jane McCreeEducation Curator: Sile McNulty GoodwinStaff Officer: Liz Forster Assistant to the Director: Dolores Fogarty Exhibitions Intern: Marysia Wieckiewicz - CarrollCollections Intern: Geoffrey PrendergastEducation Intern: Lyn KennedyAttendants: Daron Smyth, Anthony Donegan, Patrick Fitzgerald, Gerard Crotty, Jurgita Savickaite, Simon Lawlor, Niall O’Connor, Mary Broome, Christopher Ford, Derek O’Keeffe, Peter Belling

MODERN ART OxFORDDirector: Paul HobsonAssistant to the Director: Hayley RainesHead of Programmes: Sally ShawCurator of Exhibitions and Projects: Ciara MoloneyCurator of Education and Public Programming: Ben RobertsProgramme Coordinator: Jon WestonProduction Manager: Paul TeighAssistant Gallery Manager: Seb ThomasDirector, Development and Communications: Verity SlaterCommunications Manager: Hannah EvansDevelopment and Communications Assistant: Helen CorleyDirector, Commercial and Operations: John HobartOperations and Visitor Services Manager: Helen ShiltonFinance Manager: Lorraine StoneRetail Manager: Charlotte White Operations Duty Manager: Flora Cranmer - PerrierDuty Manager: Jack EdenDuty Manager: Kay SentenceTechnician: Scot Blyth Maintenance Assistant: David HealyVisitor Assistants: Mohamed Bushara, Isabella Carreras, Andrew Charlwood, Sarah Elingworth, Amanda Jempson, Deborah Martindale, Robert Mead, Matthew Retallick, Lois Sadler, Sam St Varnham, Daisy Webb, Joe Wilson, Nick Wood

ISBN 978-1-901352-60-3

© 2014 Modern Art Oxford, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, the artist and authors. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Modern Art Oxford is supported by Oxford City Council and Arts Council England.Museum of Modern Art Limited. Registered charity no. 313035

ISBN 978-1-901352-60-3